Starting An Online Business

Online retailing holds no boundaries - whether in an economic-recession or growth, business has always been good.

While the-offline retailing market is growing in low, single digit, online retailing has doubled in size in the last 24 months to become a multi-billion ringgit market.  Online retailing is possibly the best thing that has emerged in the business world.  Opportunities are in abundance if you know how to take advantage of it.

Here are some tips to get you started on online retailing, starting with the most important, "research on status trend".

When dealing and selling to people, everything always comes back to "status".  Status trend should be on your mind when tracking trends, when mapping out new strategies and when coming up with new products and services.

In fact, starting an online retail business emphasises that most of the resources and effort be spent on research.  Once you have conducted your research, the next step would be prmotions.

Online advertising dollars allocated in company budgets are today the largest that have ever been reported.  It's safe to say that emphasis is placed on online promotions by mega companies seeing the potential of online consumer growth.

The next step would be the advantage Malaysians have over online retailers from the rest of the world - product sourcing.  Malaysians are in an ideal location where most online retailers would wish for.  Malaysia is located in Asia and Asia clothes 75% of the world's population, produces 90% of electronic and multimedia devices in the world, manufactures 80% of sports equipment including shoes and offers the cheapest source of jewelery in the world.

Marketing is te final step in creating a good online retailing enterprise.  You would like to source for an online marketing platform that has millions of ready buyers, mature in its infrastructure, easy to manage from a layman's point of view and trustworthy to retail your products.

There are several choices on the Internet when you are sourcing for an online marketing platform but the best choice based on the facts above is eBay.  eBay is a success story of thousands of entrepreneurs from around the world.  While everyone and anyone can do eBay if he or she has the desire, not everyone can become a successful online entrepreneur retailing on eBay.

There are many eBayers in Malaysia and a handful that are making a living on eBay but only a few are successful online entrepreneurs.  These successful ones are entrepreneurs using eBay as their marketing platform and they are passionately involves as a business person.

Resource: The Star