The £100 online shop

The beauty of ecommerce is that it’s suited to just about anyone and achieving success is not just about how much money you throw at it.

The costs of starting an online shop are much lower than most alternatives, particularly if you are prepared to invest your own time and effort in getting things up and running. Here are ten practical tips to help you get going for less than £100:

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The A-Z of ecommerce success

As it’s the end of the year I would like to look back on the last 15 years in the ecommerce industry. Yes, scarily, I go back that long. And one of my first memories was being told by a major venture capitalist that “the internet is like CB radio, here today, gone tomorrow”. The rest, as they say, is history.

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The Easiest Way To Increase Sales...

We’re all looking for a silver bullet to transform our online business, but experience has taught most of us it doesn’t exist. That’s why I want to make a special plea – read this article. I can’t guarantee a silver bullet result, but I do think there is a genuine chance that it could make a very significant difference to sales and profitability.

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Are your customers really happy?

I’ve written in the past about many aspects of a successful start-up, including playing to your strengths, being realistic with your plans, utilising your skills and properly working out your business proposition.

But when all is said and done, there is one critical question you need to ask: are your customers happy? In the rush to get sales started, you can celebrate your first sale and then quickly move on, but that’s not the right thing to do. Instead, with your first (and probably next few) customers, make sure they’re really, really happy and that you totally understand them.

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Play to your strengths

This is my third blog in a handful of months that is essentially about people issues in a start-up, but I make no apology for that. I will, however, admit that a few years ago, before I had actually started a business, I was a sceptic on this subject. But that was then, this is now.

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Avoiding landing on the Sun – changing strategy at the earliest point

Most of us would have no problem ridiculing a government that said they were planning to put a man on the sun.

But the question we need to ask ourselves is whether we continue with equally ridiculous business strategies, and only try to change them after we’ve been frazzled?

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Why what you don't need is more important

Years ago I had a friend who lived with his parents, held down a good job and saved prodigiously. The result was that he had tens of thousands of pounds to invest as he saw fit.

One day he announced to me that he was starting his own business and had been looking at some warehouses. He didn’t know what would go in the warehouses or who would buy the goods. But they were fine warehouses available at a good rate.

This is an extreme example of the wrong way of going about starting a business. When you begin in business, you mustn’t do anything that isn’t vital at that point in time.

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Business stupidity strikes again – online payment folly

When I was a kid Guy Fawkes’ Day was a big deal. But the cost in human terms was horrific. Every year, thousands were badly burnt by fireworks, topped up by a few deaths. There was a campaign to emphasise safety – and storing fireworks carefully was one of the cardinal rules.

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Online vs Desktop Ecommerce Solutions

Over the past few months I have been involved in numerous discussions on the relative pros and cons of online vs desktop ecommerce solutions. In recent years the software landscape has changed considerably as a result of increasing broadband access and connection speeds. So much so, that my company, Actinic Software recently introduced a new online ecommerce system as a complement to the range of desktop solutions. So now that Actinic has fully embraced online ecommerce we can take off the rose-tinted spectacles and offer a completely unbiased view on the advantages of an online ecommerce solution.

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The open source delusion - Wake up!

Over the years, I’ve read numerous articles on open source, and many of them repeat the same myths. These are that all open source projects are driven by altruism, and that thousands of programmers work together on projects, each one fixing bugs as they find them.

The reality for virtually every open source project is that a small clique jealously guards its application. Letting anyone and everyone in to change the code would result in a quality disaster, as anyone with knowledge of software engineering knows. Many open source projects are pushed by one or two individuals, and cease all development when the main guy gets a girlfriend. If you’re a lucky user, they never will. But relying on luck isn’t a great business philosophy.

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