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Having a shopping cart on your Web site will allow you
to sell services or products. There are inexpensive
solutions available through your Web host, enterprise
level Business Server Plaforms such as Microsoft's Commerce
Server 2002, or a variety of custom written solutions.
Once you have
the capability to accept money automatically, your site
needs to present the services or goods to buyers in
a familiar way. People are comfortable with the concept
of using an online shopping cart. A good shopping cart
will make the buy process easy for them.
What Businesses
Use Them?
Once A wide range of businesses
from Amazone to small regional mom and pop businesses
now use shopping carts on the Internet to help their
business. For some busiensses like Amazon - it IS their
business, and for others it is just one more sales or
distribution channel.
Things
That Can Be Sold Online
Most successful
businesses have borrowed an existing idea and improved
it or re-applied it in a new way Don't re-invent the
wheel. Most businesses making money on the net today
fall under one of six categories.
- Products
- Services
- Information
industries
- Internet
- careers
- Electronic
publishing
- Electronic
advertising
Getting
Items Into the Store
Services can be sold online in a cart, just as goods
are marketed. Of course they also need descriptions
and representations of what they are.
Do you have pictures
of all of your goods in, say, jpg or gif format? Do
you have a catalogue of products that can be scanned?
A lot of time
can be spent optimizing the photos so good quality ready-sized
photos will save on time and costs.
No doubt there are others. This
is an almost generic list; the key is to distill it
down to those likely to most impact your business.
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