Online Businesses – What Type is for YOU?
As with any form of business, even the logo design business, an essential ingredient for success in online business is passion. I am not talking about a passion to make money – no one starts a business wanting to fail. What you need is a passion for the type of business you will be doing. Your online business is you and your computer. If you don’t love your work, it will become a drudgery and highly likely to be unsuccessful. A look at the basic types of online business will help you decide where you want to be.
Informational sites cover activities like blogs, e-magazines, specialized online news, databases etc. There are two ways of making money here. One is by selling information and articles either through subscriptions or against specific one time payments. What you will need to do this is to have information that is difficult to find or else presented in a way that is what your target market is looking for. Alternatively, the information can be made available free and revenue can be generated from the sale of advertising space on the site. The amount advertisers will pay is dependent on the popularity of the site.
The direct online shop is exactly what its name implies. It is a site which offers goods or services for sale. The goods are stocked by the online business who will arrange for supply against payment. All the stocking and shipment problems are taken care of by the website owner who will also need to control inventories, and sales receipts. This kind of business will require some working capital and physical space for the stocking of the goods. If you want to learn more about setting up an online shop, you can check out Ringgle’s’ online shop management features. It sure provides complete online business solutions. Profit comes from the margin on sales
The secondary, sub or affiliate online shop is similar to the online version as far as the website and presentation goes. The difference is that this type online business does not buy and stock the goods and so does not have the problems of needing a higher working capital amount and storage space. The affiliate shop can work in two ways. The most common is that orders received are passed on to the supplier who receives the payment, ships the good and pays the online business a commission on the sale.
Alternatively the online business can accept the order, receive the payment and, after deducting its commission, send the balance to the supplier who will ship the goods. The online affiliate shop is a good place to start since the amount of money and space required is low. Income in this case is solely dependent on sales commissions.
Web enabled services include project based activities such as sending bulk emails, conducting online surveys, data collection, preparing project or market reports, translation work, graphic or web design, internet marketing and so on. This type of online business is order based; that is, the order for the work is received along with an advance or part payment. Upon completion of the project, it is sent to the customer against the receipt of the balance payment. Much of the work can be regular in nature, such as in the case of ongoing contracts for sending emails or data collection. Income will be dependent on the value of projects completed.
There are other forms of online business such as medical transcription, insurance adjusting etc. which require specialized domain knowledge.
