Many of us want to quit our 9-5 jobs and start our own business. Maybe you have a great idea and want to share it with the world. Maybe you have created the ultimate waffle maker and want to sell it to anyone who may be interested.
The fact is, starting a location based store costs a lot of money. Besides negotiating the rate for this storefront space, you have got to outfit it with all the interior design work, and pay employees to be there for at least 12 hours a day, maybe more.
But there is a way to test the waters in a particular business, without costing you a second mortgage to do so. Ecommerce stores are popping up left and right, and with good reason. These online stores usually cost less than $29 a month, with some incredible added benefits when compared to a location based store.
Why should I choose an Ecommerce store over a storefront location?
I could list possibly a 100 different reasons why ecommerce stores work better than storefront locations when one is just starting off, but I will just stick to two main points. The first is the cost to start your business. Unless you have some serious cash laying around, having to put down deposits on the store, worrying about payroll, buying all the necessities to make your store look appealing to customers walking by is a huge expense.
With an Ecommerce store you literally have to pay for just the domain name and choice of store host, and that is it. While some of the larger online businesses use companies like Umbee hosting to ensure their sites never go offline, you can easily get by with the standard hosting provided by a company like Shopify.
Shopify’s $29 monthly fee covers the hosting of the website, all the product pages you create, as well as handling all the images; while tracking visitors stats and sales for you. Throw in the fact that you can get a domain name for less than $10 a year, and you have an fully functional online store available to you for a WHOLE year, for less than a month’s rent if you got a physical store location.
Do I need to worry about hosting?
The only reason why bigger companies look to larger hosting sources like Umbee hosting, is because if their site goes down for even 10 minutes, that could’ve cost them hundreds to thousands of dollars in that tiny window.
Now when you are first starting out, this should not be of any concern, but what you should be thinking about is the second major selling point on Ecommerce stores. While a storefront location may be great choice for some businesses, the fact is 99% of businesses do not open for more than 12 hours a day.
Think about that, there is half the day being wasted when you cannot and will not have any customers. If your store is closed at midnight it is impossible to get a new customer, but if you open the store up during this time you add the expense of an employee plus utility costs.
With an online business, you can go to bed at 10pm and wake up to 3 new sales waiting for you in the morning. This has got to be one of the best things about an online Ecommerce store; it’s that it does not matter what time it is on the East Coast or West Coast. All that matters is that it is morning or afternoon somewhere in the world, which means you have a bigger reach on potential customers because you can literally make a sale 24 hours a day, 365 days a year!