E-commerce is gaining pace! Study firm eMarketer predicts that 2003 will see on-line product sales reaching US $58.two billion excluding journey. According to Forrester Study, another trustworthy study business, to customer e-commerce will hit US $230 billion by the yr 2008. Whilst offline retail product sales are staggering and will continue to do so in close to term, on-line retail product sales will show a hefty 19 percent consecutive yr more than yr growth! And by the same yr, two third of all US households will purchase some type of goods and services on-line. In 2003 alone 97 million consumers will make some type of purchases through the Web.

If you are promoting goods and services offline, you should seriously consider hopping on to the e-commerce bandwagon, or risk loosing substantial part of your to your more proactive rivals!

Is it tough to begin promoting goods or services on-line?

Might be, in the beginning of Web era, this was a challenging task, but today, with proper planning it is pretty easy.

- Choose the goods or services that are viable to sell more than the Web

- Build an on-line presence

- Produce an on-line product catalog

- Choose payment methods

- Market

Choose goods or services to sell

Even though, some goods are simpler to sell on-line, contrary to popular think, most of the goods and services are, actually, marketable on the Web. At current, books, electronics, info and journey associated goods are promoting much better on-line. But, that does not imply that there is no room for other goods or services. As a issue of fact, you can sell just about something more than the Web! It is dependent more on the market section you select, and how good you are in marketing. As you know, traditional items that you can get in nearest grocery shop had been not doing very nicely on the Web. However, that is going to change very soon! According to Forrester Study many of today’s slow categories are poised to substantial growth as oppose to early on-line product sales leaders like journey and electronics, which will experience market maturity and slower growth. Prediction is:

Food and beverage category will grow at a rate of 49 percent, reaching $18.two billion by 2007. The home goods category will grow by 42 percent more than five years, from $7.three billion in 2002 to $42. billion in 2007. Flowers, cards, and presents will grow by 41 percent, from $951 million in 2002 to $five.three billion in 2007.

That is not all! By the yr 2008, today’s best promoting product: books will have a mere three percent share of total to customer on-line product sales.

So, if your goods and services can generate offline product sales there should not be any problem in promoting these items on-line.

Build on-line presence

You can select to develop an e-commerce website either your self by hiring required experts, i.e. web programmers or by appointing a website developing business to do the task for you. In both of the cases, you have to be prepared to invest a substantial amount of cash. E-commerce site is a very broad terminology! Depending on you need, it can price you from a modest US $800 to any where more than a million US dollar! That is not all! You have to be prepared to spare considerable time on it, as nicely. Composing the technical scope, choosing the suitable style for your site and creating proper content material for your site will take a lot of your time. And there is no assure that you will do every thing correct!

That is why, if you are new to e-commerce and do not want to invest a fortune in your first endeavor, you should believe about making your on-line presence by choosing 1 of the accessible, on the Web, Internet Store services. There are enormous benefits of utilizing these services:

- You can develop 1 for a fraction of the price, needed to produce an e-commerce website.

- You can select the style of your web shop from several accessible templates.

- Easy editor permits you creating your web shop all by your self.

- You can be up and running within days.

- You can select a merchant account from the 1 offered by the service provider.

There are many Internet Store service providers on the Web like Yahoo! Store, Bigstep, Rusbiz, and so on. Compare and select the 1, which best fits your requirement. As an additional advantage, some of the Internet Store service providers will integrate your shop with a purchasing mall or e-marketplace free of cost. This will instantly expose your web shop to a big targeted prospective consumer audience. Produce an on-line catalog

If you sell only 1 or couple of goods and do not add goods or services often, you do not need an on-line catalog. However, if you have a product line of more than 10 goods and you continuously add or change goods, you should consider a web shop with the facility of an on-line product catalog. This feature of a web shop service permits rapid developing and maintaining of you digital catalog without spending big sums on creating 1 by your self.

Appear for a web shop service provider who offers wizard or form base product including method to the digital catalog and use some type of standard product classification codes. At later on stage, if you select to sell goods through e-marketplaces, this will permit you to integrate your goods to e-marketplaces and make product sales offers with ease.

Choose a payment method

If you are planning to sell ebooks, reviews, whitepapers and so on. I would suggest you to consider utilizing clickbank’s marketplace. That way, you do not have to be concerned about getting a credit card merchant account.

Around 90 percent of all product sales transaction happen on-line are by credit card payments. To accept credit card payment more than the Web, you must first have a merchant account. A merchant account permits a vendor to process credit card transactions. If you built a web shop on-line with 1 of the web shop service providers, you will see that they offer gateways to 1 or several merchant account providers and have partnership with them. In common, you get a much better offer with them. However, as charges vary substantially from 1 merchant account provider to another, make certain you shop about prior to committing your self to 1.

Market you site

To sell your goods through your site, you must draw visitors. There are number of methods of advertising your site on the Web. This includes:

- Lookup engine submissions

- Adding your site to various on-line directories

- Opt-in e-mail campaign

- Link trade

- Banner and hyperlink ads

In you effort to promote your site, you should combine as many offline and on-line promotional methods you can come up with. The more visitors you can generate the much better opportunity you have of promoting more goods from your Internet Store.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, main developer and current CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Info Technology, he has broad experience in Business Consulting, Worldwide Trade and Internet Marketing. Rusbiz is a International B2B Emarketplace with options to begin and operate on-line . You can get in touch with him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com, http://www.rusbiz.com