To make that question online sales a little easier, we have compiled a few points to consider.  These are by no means comprehensive, and they are only the beginning steps in this decision process. If you have any questions, be sure to get in touch with us for more information.

1. What products/services do I have to sell?

First, of course, you must consider your products. A friend in college once tried to sell old dorm room furniture he found at the end of each semester online. The problem is that no one wanted to pay shipping because it was more than his sale price. He was selling large items cheaply, but it was impractical. Needless to say, he was able to outfit quite a few rooms in pressboard and fake wood veneer.

His chief problem was not considering what he had to sell. How many products do you have? If there are only 4, will their sale justify the time and expense of setting up an online store? How much will it cost to ship your products? Will customers pay for this?

What about the cost of each product? You can’t sell houses online. At least not with regular success. (I know there are exceptions, so please don’t point out the two guys out there who are successfully selling homes online). No one is going to enter credit card info for $95,000. At the same time, if your products are 95 cents, will the income sustain your effort?

No one knows your products better than you. You know what they are worth, what people are willing to pay, and how best to sell them to your customers. If you’re not sure about any if these things, take a look at a competitor and see how they are faring.

2. Is there a market for my products/services?

Closely tied to the last point, demand is key. You can have the most amazing product in the world, but if no one buys it, you’re left with a warehouse full of amazingness.

I have comic books from my youth, and for a while I contemplated selling them to help pay for college. The problem is, no one wanted to pay me what everyone said they were worth.  Maybe they’ll do better once my kids need braces or something.  My problem was that there was no demand.

No one wanted was I was trying to sell, and definitely not at my price. I know all of your products are perfect. They are what everyone needs, though maybe they just don’t know about it yet. Chances are, they may never know. So anything you are looking to sell online needs a market now. Do you have demand for your products? More importantly, is there demand in the online community?

3. Do I have the ability to expand online?

Most brick and mortar businesses are lmited to 30-40 miles of sales.  Granted, unique shops can get random travellers and repeat shoppers due to good experience, but the majority of stores are sustained by the local shopper. With the advent of online sales, your customers can now range across the US, and sometimes across the world.  But can you manage that?

A wider customer base means a larger marketing and advertising effort. You will need shipping capabilities and various payment methods. Will your location allow for you to maintain inventory if demand does skyrocket? Will you need more employees to process orders?

Most business owners don’t look to scaling when they start out. But in an online atmosphere, you must be prepared because any problems with customer experience results in lost customers.

4. Is this going to save my business?

Lastly, and most importantly, you need to ask yourself whether selling online will save your business.  Your answer needs to be “No.”

If your business is doing well, expanding to and online store may help grow it. Provided you have great products, demand, and the capabilities to manage online sales well, selling online can’t hurt and can really only help.

But if you are looking for an online store to salvage what’s left of your business, don’t do it.  Look for something – anything – else. Selling online has a minimum (and I mean minimum) of 6 months before being profitable, and that’s only if you have a great product with high demand, good search engine placement, impressive advertising, and an incredible user experience.  That’s the best-case scenario.

I know I paint a bit of a bleak picture, but I’ve seen success and failure and everythign in between. Selling online looks easy, but it takes a lot fo time and effort to be successful. Most of the guys who have amazing stories of a startup gone global overnight also have stories of 50 other failed ventures and many sleepless nights of work.

So are you going to sell online? Check back here in the coming weeks as we look through the various shopping carts, stores, checkout processes available for getting your products out there.

And as always, if you have any questions about selling online, contact us today.

Oftentimes the clients that we deal with at Three Stream are small to medium sized businesses, and are not too enthusiastic about dropping $600 for Adobe Photoshop.  Never fear, business owner!  You too can have the power to easily compress quality images to a size that will make your website load faster – before your customer moves on to somewhere else.  Here is my recommendation on a free way to save your images for the web.

Introducing… drum roll please… Web Resizer  http://www.webresizer.com

So here is all you have to do:

1. Go to http://www.webresizer.com
2. Click the button marked “Resize Photo Now”
3. Browse to find the image on your computer and upload it
4. Make your changes (crop, resize, etc.) and click “Apply Changes”
5. Download the image to your computer

Among the optimization features for this web app are cropping, image enhancement, resizing, rotating, and adding borders.  There are also great help features that tell you what each option does.  You can even make images black and white (for all you purists out there).

Now you might be wondering… what happens to my images?  Who are these people who own the program? Do they now have a copy of my image?  According to them, they are photographers who created the tool for their clients who want to update their own websites.  The web app temporarily takes your images for a 60 minute session, and then deletes it off their server, never to be shared or distributed except by you.

For months now my Fa-in-law, an outstanding investor and strategic thinker, has been telling me about the merits of investing in MSFT. I have always seen the stock as a sleeper, and the company as a giant monolith that steals and cheats to keep the little guy down, but on my father-in-law’s recommendation I have been keeping my eye on the company. Now with the release of Office 2010 and some of the shifts that the company is potentially making, I think it might be time to pull the trigger.

Below are 4 reasons why I think MSFT has good potential and what we can learn from it:

Reason #1: Softy is finally getting into the cloud.
The world of software has changed and for quite some time Microsoft has been reluctant to change with it. Only recently has the term “Cloud Computing” become a buzzword amongst businesspeople, but smart and innovative software companies like 37signals have been running software in the cloud for quite some time.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of cloud computing, just replace the word cloud with the word datacenter – datacenter computing.  Essentially it means that rather than operating your software and storing your data on a bulky machine (laptop , desktop, or server) that is ultimately susceptible to everything from fires to coffee spills, you are operating your software in a datacenter that is protected through redundant backups and top notch security. Furthermore, because this software is not operated on an individual device, it is not as limited by the capabilities of that device and it can also be synced across devices. Bottom line, cloud computing is what will allow you to locate important data such as your contacts on your mobile phone, laptop, and desktop and all in perfect sync because you are accessing them on a web browser and the data is stored in the cloud.

Welcome to the future Microsoft. This transition, for a company whose basic business has been built on the bedrock of local machine based computing, shows that Microsoft is willing to grow and reinvent in the face of changes in the business environment in which they operate.

Reason #2: Softy is starting to give away software for free.
I know what you are thinking, “how can Microsoft make money if they are giving away software for free?” It is actually simple and companies are doing it all over the web. Think about the websites you visit and the apps that you use on a daily basis – Google, Facebook, Twitter perhaps, maybe even CNN.com. All of these sites listed give away a service for free and still manage to make money, gobs of money. They do this by getting such an unbelievable amount of traffic (because they are free) that they can make money on alternative models such as advertising, rather than charging the consumer directly.

The future is free, especially in the world of online software. It is always going to be easier to get a nickel out of a customer than it is a thousand dollars. With large amounts of traffic that are possible over the web, companies like Google are making billions of dollars a nickel at a time simply because they are not too greedy to prevent the masses from using their service by charging for it. Think of what might have happened if this garage based company called Google decided to charge a fee to use their wonderful search engine — we might have added the phrase Alta-Vistaed to our search vernacular because we would have used something else.

Making money on the web is about developing a critical mass of activity and traffic that can later be leveraged into dollars. Short sighted companies are killing their own ideas by trying to make immediate dollars when they should be thinking about getting immediate traffic. This also applies to service businesses. There are independent bloggers out there that make a killing by giving away free information about a particular topic because they are driving scads of traffic.

Lesson – as my uncle used to always tell me about the real estate business, “activity breeds activity.” Businesses on the web today must think bigger than immediate profits, and start thinking about creating a critical mass of activity around their brand.

Reason #3 Softy is getting back to their roots and continuing to do what they do best.
“What does Microsoft do best?” you ask. The answer is that it continues to steal great ideas from its creative competitors and then make them better and more acceptable to the general public. Google Apps, yet another one of Google’s brilliant innovations, is a great example of a game changing idea that posed a serious threat to Microsoft’s business. It is really better than Office, has more features, offers better data security (because data is not stored on a machine susceptible to coffee spills), and best of all it is free. However, fortunately for the people over at Microsoft, Google has a long track record of introducing brilliant ideas and then flopping when it comes to execution and FOLLOW-THROUGH. This has opened the door for Microsoft to do what it has always done best… R&D – Rip off and Duplicate.

Lesson for us little guys – innovation is only of use to a company if it is accompanied by execution and follow-through.

Reason #4: Softy is fundamentally a strong company.
This is a lesson to all of us wannabies trying to grow our small businesses. Ultimately, the reason Microsoft is going to be a good investment for the future is because it has a strong core business, good cash flow and tons of cash on the books (about 30 billion last I looked). Lesson, businesses will grow, and always have grown, through fundamental strength not choking debt combined with fleeting ideas.

So here is the list, and please note that it is by no means exhaustive. It is simply a short list of mistakes that we see businesses and small towns make time and time again when putting on an event.

1. Not enlisting sponsors sooner – Most high level sponsors require a year and sometimes more in order to sponsor an event. The sponsors who are worth getting operate on what is essentially a first-come, first-served basis, and they assume that if the people running an event have their act together, then they will be able to request sponsorship a year in advance.
2. Poor communication amongst volunteer staff – Because volunteers are the backbone for many events, communications between event coordinators and the volunteer staff is a must. First and foremost, the coordinators need to have clear and consistent communications, but that needs to translate down to every volunteer involved.
3. Poor media outreach – Many people assume that the events getting covered in the media got there by luck and therefore hope that their event gets coverage while taking few, if any, active steps to make this coverage happen. Successful event coordinators know that luck has little to do with it. Good media coverage is the result of making your event available to the media through strong outreach to media outlets.
4. Limited advertising – If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it fall, does it make a sound? Likewise, if an exceptionally planned event takes place and no one is around to enjoy it and take part, did it really happen? Successful event coordinators do not rely on word of mouth to make their event a success — they employ results-driven advertising strategies.
5. Poor website design – People don’t really judge a book by its cover… or do they? Successful event coordinators realize that their website might be the only thing people really see of an event before they come, and therefore its look and feel is paramount in the decision-making process for potential customers. A good, search engine optimized, user friendly website is a must for those serious about creating a successful event.
6. Poor web exposure – Modern society has moved beyond the information age and on to the recommendation age. Today people get their recommendations from Trip Advisor, Twitter, Facebook, and countless blogs and online media outlets. Successful event planners create online buzz and watch the viral impact of the web spread the word about their event.
7. Poor follow-up – It costs 10 times as much to convert a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. Successful event planners employ follow-up strategies such as maintaining opt-in email lists, and blogging to keep customers informed. If you are looking for an email marketing package for this purpose, we have created 3mail our email marketing system, but in order to not appear entirely self-serving we also recommend Mail Chimp.

Well, these are just a few of our thoughts; now give us yours below.   If you are needing help promoting your next event, feel free to contact us.