Issue 5 2019

CEO MONTHLY / ISSUE 5 2019 19 Look at your potential profit margins and see what selling could mean for your business. You might be surprised at how much revenue you’re missing out on! 3. It’s Too Expensive This is a major obstacle for many service-based businesses because they’ve seen how expensive it used to be to get into e-commerce, but it’s not anymore. We looked at the barriers such as making your service viable and how time can factor in. Both indicate loss of revenue for the existing business if you split your time and start up some e-commerce. In reality it’s unbelievably cheap to start selling online. Whether you choose Woocommerce for your Wordpress website, open a Shopify store, or opt for BigCommerce you won’t have to break the bank to get up and running. With Woocommerce the expense is whatever your professional web developer costs. This system works with Wordpress so if you’re already up and running with Wordpress then you’re cost will either be your time in trying to set it up yourself or the cost of getting it done professionally. Shopify and Bigcommerce both make it much easier but they’ll also either need to be installed as a subdomain of your existing website or you’ll be setting up a whole new one. These two have near identical pricing starting at $30 per month and this includes your hosting. They take care of everything such as credit card processing and there is no shortage of apps 3 Barriers to Break and Get Your Service-Based Business E-commerce Ready to handle functionality not native to their platforms. Taking this approach will be time consuming though. If you hire a professional developer for any of these systems, make sure they really know the platforms beforehand because they differ greatly right down to the programming languages they’re built with. Of course, there are plenty of other options to consider such as 1ShoppingCart or even Infusionsoft and Magento, which are considered to be higher-end options for large-scaled shops. Ultimately, the short answer to the question is: no, it’s not too expensive. This is because the price range starts with FREE. The real cost is your time and the only risk is wasting it. If you do elect to explore e-commerce as an option, put a lot of time into the planning. Not just one day of grinding out ideas but weeks of spit balling and brain storming. Look around at what others in your industry have done and even more importantly what they’ve not done and plan everything out properly. Hiring a professional business mentor to guide you can be the best decision you ever made. You’ll be walked past the typical hiccups and hurdles and on your way to launching your e-commerce project much faster and with much less effort. More and more service-based businesses are seeing the potential of e-commerce so the quicker you jump into the ring the better. For many, the e-commerce even takes over as the primary revenue driver.