What are your main venues for selling?  If you’re like many brick-and-mortar companies who have not yet realised the value of selling online, there’s only two real options for selling: through the telephone or through mail-order.  Granted, there are many people that would still prefer these means over buying online, but there are thousands more all over the world that prefer to buy from online businesses.  Why not have your company be among them?  If you do decide to start selling online, you’ll have the following advantages: the potential for significantly more customers, the ability to run your online business at a lower cost and the ability to interact more personally with your customers through email marketing.

First, when you have an online business, you are exposing your company to people all over the globe.  When you’re not selling online, you are only limited to however many people you can send catalogs to.  Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to online businesses and the large numbers of customers available to you is that there is no need to worry about having to exchange currencies.  This is because both national and international customers can use Paypal or other payment processors to purchase products from your online business.  In fact, if your online business offers Paypal to a customer who has never used it before, you’ll receive a commission. 

Secondly, there is the issue of the decreased costs associated with selling online.  In fact, after a few months of success with an online business, you may decide to shut down your brick-and-mortar enterprise.  Why?  It’s because it costs a lot of money to run businesses offline.  You have to buy retail space, which in and of itself can costs thousands.  You also have to hire a staff.  Additionally, you need a merchant account to take credit cards from your customers.  All of these factors are eliminated when it comes to running an online business.  The only real fees associated with selling online is hosting, and, (if you decide to use it), pay-per-click marketing.  With pay-per-click marketing you would post advertisements about your online business that would appear next to the results of search engine listings.

Lastly, when you are selling online, you are able to establish a more personal relationship with your customer through email marketing.  Of course, you would want to make sure that the customer agreed to be sent emails by your company.  You could do this by offering a free e-course or e-book in exchange for them allowing you to put their name and email on your subscriber list.  Once you have this information, you can inform them of all the deals your online business might be offering.  You can also issue periodic surveys, to determine what types of merchandise your customers would like to see in the future from your online business.