Building a Professional E-Commerce Site for Success

The saying goes that on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. That's fine only if your small business can project a professional-looking oneand that takes some work.

The basic Yahoo! store that you've built using Yahoo! Store Editor, or the free site you set up for your offline business through one of the free Web communities, such as Yahoo! GeoCities, can carry your full-time small business only so far. To succeed on a full-time basis using a Yahoo! business, you need to customize your online storefront to reinforce your company's brand.

Branding

The design of your e-commerce site holds the key to company branding. The importance of branding cannot be stressed enough. It's the starting point of any successful company, online or offline. Is your brand a description of your company? Or of you? Shoppers could care less about who you are; they want to know what you can do for them.

What we're describing here, of course, is a company's unique selling position (USP). The USP is the company brand, and the company brand is its USP. We spoke of the USP and its importance in our first book, Launching Your Yahoo! Business. Your company brand is your identitywho you are, what you can provide customers, and how you differentiate your business from the competition.

Web Resource: What's Your Branding IQ?

Take the five-minute Branding Test at www.chadwickcommunications.com/brandiq to find out if you put your brand first at your company.

Good online branding encompasses a storefront that is customer-friendly in both design and content. Easy-to-understand site navigation has content and visitor interaction that promotes the sale of your product or service. The "look and feel" of your storefront should communicate the correct message about your company and your offerings to your target customers. This can be accomplished using the customizing features available through the Yahoo! store program and through carefully architecting your website.

Taking time to design, or architect, your website on paper and put your USP into your website from the start will go a long way in creating a professional and successful promotional vehicle for selling your goods or services.

Promotion

"Early to bed, early to rise. Work like a dog and advertise." Funny, but true. A good understanding of online marketing, and translating that understanding into a solid online marketing plan, is very important if you want to succeed with your full-time Yahoo! business.

A professional online business requires a professional marketing plan that describes how to position a business in the digital marketplace, acquire and retain customers, and, most important, make money from customers. Your comprehensive marketing plan is the vehicle that promotes your company's brand.

Management and Operations

Even if your business is termed "small," you are faced with the organizational challenges of any full-time business. These include your day-to-day operations of inventory control, customer service, employee relations, recruiting and hiring the proper people, payroll, benefits, and key personnel training.

Web Resource: Do You Know How to Properly Manage a Company?

The ACOA website offers a detailed Business Management Questionnaire at www.acoa.ca/e/business/practices/page01.shtml that will help you shed light on your management practices and strategies.

Obviously, to run a full-time business, you need personnel other than yourself. You also need a management team to supervise your staff as it grows with your business. Employee relations and leadership qualities are just as important in a small business owner as they are in the CEO of a large company. In addition, how you recruit, hire, pay, and offer benefits to your employees will affect the success of your full-time business. Collecting and reporting city, state, and federal taxes also comes into play when you have employees.

As for customer relations, there is no face-to-face or real-time interaction with customers when running an online business. Current technology can help with some of this, but "pressing the flesh" of a customer is still many years off. That means your business must try doubly hard to create a solid relationship with customers and prospects.

Legalities and Funding

Capital drives business. If you are going to build a full-time professional business, acquiring capital will become a necessary component of your business plan. The formal business plan (see Write a Business Plan in No Time [Que, 2005] by Frank Fiore) that you will need to create for your professional business will require, at the very least, a three-year financial projection of revenue and expenses, called a proforma. The proforma helps you build a budget for your small business that you can use to manage your cash flow.

Your business plan should also describe not only what your funding needs are, but how and where you will acquire the funds. The exercise of writing a formal business plan will be a great help in not only raising capital for your business (even if you self-fund your business), but managing it as well.

When you become a small business, it's also time to rethink your business structure. Should you incorporate or remain a sole proprietor? If you do incorporate, what form of corporation is best?

The questions of branding, marketing, operations, funding, and more are covered in the upcoming chapters. In the next chapter, we look at the most important components of a formal plan.