Before you begin any sort of implementation, it’s important to assess the viability of your business plan. Is there a large enough market for you to take a small slice of the pie? Are there too many competitors for you to be successful?

Determining your target customer and the size of the market you are pursuing is crucial in determining whether you can make enough money to sustain a profitable business. Instead of just guessing, you should try and make a concerted effort to quantify your earning potential as best you can.
Figure Out What Your Ideal Customer is Like
The first step is to write down in great detail what your target customer is like. Here are a few questions to ask yourself about your target market

What demographic are you targeting? For example, ask yourself what age group, income level, gender, sex, education level, race …

Entrepreneurs love creating businesses from scratch because of the excitement and unfettered determination of starting something brand new. I remember when my wife and I first started our online store, we ate, drank and slept with the business 24/7. Practically every meal, we discussed at length our products, our strategy and our execution plan. Even in bed, we constantly came up with new ideas and discussed our goals for the following day. The atmosphere was intense, almost too intense.

Intensity is good but there’s always a fine line that you must not overstep or you risk burning yourself out. This is what happened to us. Don’t let it happen to you.

We Tried to Do Too Much
The early stages of our online store could best described by a single word: impatience. We were eager to launch the store as quickly as possible so we worked ourselves …

Because you will be purchasing many items throughout the life of your online business, it is inevitable that you will run into a dispute at some point in time with a store, vendor or service that you regularly use. Especially in the early stages of your business, you’re likely to have very little clout with your vendors which makes even showing up on their radar screen a challenging task. The unfortunate reality is that small business owners and individuals often get screwed by customer service reps of larger companies because they simply do not know how to negotiate and appear larger than they really are. This article will help you successfully negotiate with your vendors even if you’re a small business or individual. Special thanks to Anita “the Negotiator”, for contributing to this entry.
Find The Person Who Has Decision Making Power
No negotiation tactics …

I regularly help out my friends and answer questions on various shopping cart forums regarding how to advertise effectively using Adwords. What I discovered in the course of helping these people was that almost all of them had incorrect preconceived notions on how to use Adwords effectively. I’d say that probably 90% of these people believed that Adwords would just magically bring profitable conversions to their online store with very little effort and time. Because these notions were so prevalent, I just thought that I’d take the time to set a few things straight.
Reality #1 – You Need To Spend Money To Make Money
Adwords is going to cost you quite a bit of money in the beginning until you’ve settled down upon your most effective keywords. Who cares if you just received a $75 dollar credit to use Google Adwords? The goal is not …

Anyone who tells you that they got their business right on their first try is probably lying, forgetful, or trying to sell you something. My wife and I went through a multitude of ideas in the first month alone that went absolutely nowhere. A few of these ideas actually made us a few bucks but in the end didn’t work out for various reasons. While most of the ideas we came up with were very viable options and I’m sure you could make a decent living with some of the businesses below, they just weren’t right for us. Here are some ideas we had that just didn’t pan out.
Craigslist Ebay Arbitrage
I used to comb Craiglist in my free time to see if there were any deals on electronics. If you were lucky, you could find that special person who was moving out …

Starting a business when you are pregnant is not the most ideal situation. It would have been a lot easier had we planned for this more ahead of time. Ironically, I always knew I was going to quit when we had kids, but for some reason, the lost income from quitting my job didn’t hit us until we ran the numbers. In any case, the startup phase of our business was characterized in 3 distinct trimesters.
The First Trimester
You are going to feel like shit. This is the period where you’ll need the most support from your husband because you’ll be either too dizzy or nauseous to get any meaningful work done. Try to pick a time of day to work on your business when are feeling the best. In my case, I felt my strongest a few hours after dinner.

Keep a Trash Can Nearby …

The one downside of running an online store or business is that inevitably you’ll encounter a customer who is extremely abrasive and condescending. This particular lady placed an order with us, misread the description and then accused us of misleading her into making a purchase.

Customer: Yes, I’m calling because my order was not delivered correctly?

Me: Oh really? We apologize for that ma’am. What is your order number?

Customer: Order xxxx.

Me: Yes it shows here that you ordered a single four corner embroidered lace handkerchief. Was that not the contents in your package?

Customer: The type of handkerchief was correct, but I only got delivered one instead of four.

Me: There seems to be a misunderstanding. The handkerchief has embroidery on all four corners. It does not come with 4 handkerchiefs.

Customer: Well, let me tell you that that is extremely misleading. …

My wife and I constantly discuss different ways to build our overall wealth. Our goal is to retire and be able to spend all of our time with our children. We’ve tried a lot of different things over the years, but our most miserable experience arose when we decided to drastically cut back on our bottom line expenses. I think we started doing this after I read the book “The Millionaire Next Door” which is a book about how most millionaires become wealthy by being extremely frugal and compounding their money over time.

So we tried being frugal, cutting back on going out to eat and pretty much eliminating all of our entertainment expenses. After trying to do this for about 4 weeks, I finally got fed up and decided to calculate whether this was worth all of the misery. At that time, we had …

Are sales slow? Are your customers simply buying a single cheap item in your store and checking out? Does your store suffer from poor repeat business? Even though you might offer great products and write excellent product descriptions for your items, often times that’s not enough to make your store a success. Besides just having an attractive storefront, there are many other aspects to selling that have nothing to do with the products or your website. This article will explore the mental aspects of selling. Here are 5 tips that should help you improve your sales.

Offer Products at a Range of Prices
Every customer that walks into your store will have different objectives, so its important to offer high end products as well as low end ones to cover the entire range of customers you may encounter. While the bulk of your sales will …

For some reason, it was especially difficult for me to get up out of bed this morning to get ready for work. As I was getting dressed, I stood there looking at my wife who was sleeping blissfully on the bed and I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous. My wife was sleeping in because she recently quit her day job in order to spend her full time with the kids.

“Okay honey, I’m going off to work now!” I hollered hoping she’d stir a bit.

“Hey, did you know that I was trying to sleep?” she hollered back with her eyes half closed. “In fact, I think I’ll sleep until 10 and then maybe I’ll go take a walk in the park with baby. Hmm, I’m not sure what I’ll do after that. My schedule is just so wide open”

Just imagining …

Assuming you ship physical goods to your end customer, at some point you’ll need to figure out how you will be getting your products to their destinations. There are a multitude of different ways to ship packages and it can get quite confusing deciding what the best option is for your online store. I’ll provide a breakdown of the 3 biggest shipping carriers and when or why you should ever use them. I will rate these 3 services based on following criteria: price and reliability.

United States Postal Service (USPS)
Price
USPS is by far the cheapest shipping option if your parcel weighs less than 2 pounds. Parcels weighing 13 ounces or less that qualify for first class postage are even cheaper to ship. At the present time, USPS offers 3 main shipping services

First Class Mail – Arrives within 2-5 business days
Priority Mail – Arrives within 2-3 business …

It’s really tough to go against your own nature. I admit it. When it comes to running a business, I’m extremely frugal and very anal about the way things are run. In general, frugality and anality are good character traits when it comes to running a business, but sometimes these traits can hold you back. In this article, I’d like to discuss some mistakes that we made early on that probably stunted our growth a little bit.
We Used Cheap Vendors
There’s something about getting a great price or bargain that is irresistibly attractive. Early on, we tried to maximize profit by looking for the cheapest possible vendors we could find to purchase our products from in bulk. While the products were cheap, the service was absolutely atrocious and the products had a very high defect rate. As a result, we wasted a lot of …

I don’t know why, but for some reason, our customers always want to tell me their life story when they make a purchase over the phone. They nonchalantly ask me about the merchandise and then slowly steer the conversation towards what’s going on in their life. In some extreme cases, they ask me for advice, not on the products mind you, but on personal life decisions. My wife says that I’m extremely polite on the phone with customers but I don’t think that I come across as a psychiatrist! In any case, the following lady clearly needed professional assistance with her situation. Maybe I should consider becoming a shrink?

Customer: Yes I would like to order some personalized handkerchiefs for the groom and his groomsmen. I was thinking of embroidering my name and the grooms name along with the wedding date on the handkerchiefs.

Me: …

We get a lot of customers who purchase our linens on behalf of a large organization or for a specific event. This particular customer managed a local charity that supports children born with a certain disease (I’m keeping the specific charity anonymous for privacy reasons). She was looking for personalized handkerchiefs to congratulate all of her kids for persevering at an annual charity picnic. Sounds like a very sweet gift right?

Customer: Yes, I’m looking for some handkerchiefs that I can purchase in bulk and have a short message embroidered on them. I run a local charity and these will be gifts for the children for an annual event.

Me: Yes, maam. Our personalized and monogrammed handkerchiefs would be perfect for your event. They are located here on our website. (I then email her the link)

Customer: Thanks for the link. I’m looking to buy …

The million dollar question is always how to get more people to visit your website or online store. In general, there is no way to get traffic quickly unless you have a big budget for advertising. The best thing that you can do, is to lay a solid foundation and your traffic will gradually increase over time. Beware of sites or people that promise you millions of hits overnight. These are all scams. Here are 10 things that you can do to get more traffic to your store in the long run.

Apply to Get Into DMOZ
In a nutshell DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP for short, is a web directory maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It’s special because the search engines, especially Google, place a lot of weight on your website if you manage to make it onto the …

People often ask how we decided to sell wedding handkerchiefs and linens on the Internet. While my husband might have a different opinion, in my mind we fell into the idea with a bit of luck and good timing. When we were brainstorming ideas on businesses to start, I was infatuated with my latest hobby, embroidery. I really wanted to incorporate my hobby with our future business because I figured that there would be a high demand for personalized embroidered items and it was something I could relate to. As I started thinking about what kind of things I could embroider, the idea of selling wedding handkerchiefs jumped into my mind.

I remembered when I was getting married that I really wanted a personalized wedding handkerchief with my name, my husband’s name and our wedding date. At the time, I hadn’t started my hobby yet so it didn’t even occur to …

I think of limited liability companies or LLCs as a hybrid between an S corporation and a sole proprietorship. LLCs, like S Corps and sole proprietorships, are pass through tax entities in that taxes on income are filed under an individual’s income tax return. The LLC also provides limited liability protection. The main advantage of LLCs is that it can provide you with limited liability protection without the hefty paperwork requirements of corporations. So what questions should you ask yourself?

Corporate Structure

Legal Structure Overview
Sole Proprietorship
Limited Liability Company
S Corporation
C Corporation

Do You Really Need Limited Liability?
The LLC is very attractive from a limited liability standpoint mainly because of the informal low cost aspect of running one. Compared to a corporation, there is much less paperwork involved and its extremely easy to form and dissolve.

However the liability protection, like a corporation, comes at a cost. All states treat …

I used to think that C corporations were meant only for large successful companies. When I think of C Corps, I think of big names like Microsoft, Google and IBM and definitely not a small business. In reality, it’s pretty easy to become a c corporation.

Anyone can file for C corporation status, but typically small businesses shy away from C corps until they are solidly profitable. Because the C corporation is probably the most complicated corporate structure that you can possibly have, there are a lot of questions that you should ask yourself before you decide to become one.

Corporate Structure

Legal Structure Overview
Sole Proprietorship
Limited Liability Company
S Corporation
C Corporation

Are You Ready For the Paperwork?
C corporations require the most paperwork of all of the corporate structures. There are complicated tax rules involved and legal and accounting costs as well. In short, a C corp is probably the most …

In general, S Corporations are valuable when you require the limited liability protection that a corporation provides and when your business is not profitable. S corporations are pass through entities which means that all income is passed directly to the shareholders who pay taxes under their own individual income tax rates. As a result, the S corporation itself does not have to pay any federal income taxes. Before electing to create an S corporation, here are a few questions that you should be asking yourself.

Corporate Structure

Legal Structure Overview
Sole Proprietorship
Limited Liability Company
S Corporation
C Corporation

Do You Absolutely Require Limited Liability?
Filing for an S corporation requires a significant amount of paperwork compared to a sole proprietorship. Even though the income for an S corporation is passed directly to the individual, a separate tax return must be filed because an S corp is treated as a separate tax paying …

Sometimes there are products that we carry that I’m not intimately familiar with. Because buying and stocking items for our online store is primarily my wife’s responsibility, she has much more knowledge about our products than I do. Fortunately, I don’t have to take that many customer support calls so my weaknesses are not often exposed.

However, every now and then, I’ll get a customer that truly tests my knowledge. This was one such customer who pushed me to my limits.

Customer: Yes. I’m looking for some linens that I can use to host a tea party.

Me: We offer a line of cotton and linen tea napkins exactly for that purpose. I will send you the URL for the webpage that lists these products.

Customer: Are these napkins thick? Because I’m looking for something very sheer and delicate.

Me: Hmm….They are napkins so they are definitely on …

If you fear excessive paperwork and you want to keep it simple, then a sole proprietorship is the way to go. Establishing a sole proprietorship is so easy, that you don’t have to do anything at all. By default, the IRS considers all business owners sole proprietors. Because going with a sole proprietorship is stress free and easy, many people stay as solos early on. Since everyone has their own situation however, below are a few questions you should ask yourself.

Corporate Structure

Legal Structure Overview
Sole Proprietorship
Limited Liability Company
S Corporation
C Corporation

Is Liability a Concern?
Are you selling items or services that are prone to getting sued? For example, do you sell any food articles or anything that could be potentially dangerous? If you require liability protection, then sole proprietorships are definitely not for you. Since the US is such a litigious country, anyone can sue you …

The design of your website is one of the most fundamental aspects of your online store. You must consider what your customers will find appealing even though it may not necessarily match your tastes. In addition to the aesthetics, there are many structural guidelines that should be followed as well. As I look at online stores across the web, I still find that many people are making fundamental mistakes with their websites. Below are a few of the most common.
Busy Backgrounds or Flashing Text
There’s nothing more annoying that a busy, gaudy background. Even if what you are selling is ridiculously garish, you should always use a plain, even toned background.

Nothing says cheap or used car salesman more than flashing text either. Whenever I see flashing text, I generally hit the back button right away.
Music
I keep my speakers on at all times …