Many businesses start off as brick and mortar establishments but there may come a time to wonder when is a good time to open an online business? For some businesses, adding an online store can boost sales tremendously. It is a way to reach millions of customers who may have never heard of your product or service.

Success of Your Business
Some businesses are in great locations earning large revenues so opening an online store can add to their bottom line significantly. However, if your business is new or even struggling, an online store can boost sales and may even do better than a physical location. Depending upon how poor sales are in a brick and mortar, an online store could eventually bring in more sales, thus, resulting in closing the brick and mortar all together.

What You Need To Know
Now a days, opening an online store is easier than ever before. You have the option of using services such as eBay, PayPal, or Yahoo! which provide everything you need to get your business online. The first thing you would need to do is purchase a domain name. Hopefully, your business name is available. You can purchase your domain from a registrar and there are tons of them on the web. The average cost for a domain name is around $10.00 or less. The next step would be to decide on whether or not you want to use a service which provides an all in one shopping cart using SSL (web encryption), and a merchant account. This is a good option for those who are not very tech savvy, however, these type of services can take a big chunk out of your profits because they take a certain percentage of your sales.

Using an open source shopping cart is a better choice in the long run. Open source software typically means "free software" in which you are free to re-distribute, view, and alter the source code. Even if you're uncomfortable with the technical aspects of setting it up, you can always outsource the work to a capable web programmer. The costs involved with using an open source shopping cart include web hosting (most hosting companies are inexpensive), purchasing an SSL certificate (for encrypting sensitive data such as credit card numbers), and a merchant account to process credit card payments. This may sound overwhelming but if you find a reliable web programmer familiar with ecommerce web sites, it can be a painless process.

Getting the Sales
Once you have your online store open, the next step is to get customers to your site. This involves some advertising techniques and time. If you have advertising budget you can hire an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialist or company to optimize your site for specific keywords pertaining to your business. This method takes time as they are optimizing your site to rank well on the search engines. You can also use PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads in which you pay for each click your ads receive. This can be costly if you are inexperienced so it helps to get advice or learn the proper way to use PPC ads. You can also write articles pertaining to your product or service and submit to free article directories. This results in free advertising and back links to your web site. Starting a business blog can also attract free web traffic. Over time, these various methods of internet marketing will produce results.

Opening an online store can benefit successful businesses as well as those that are struggling to stay afloat. Struggling businesses may even find that an online store is more cost effective than having a physical location. The best thing to do is weigh your options and learn more about what it takes to maintain an online business.

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