6. Do you give up easily? One of my favorite sayings about business is: "If it was easy, everybody would do it." Starting a business is hard work and odds for failure are against you in first few years. If you want to ride herd on your own business, you must be willing to fall off your horse a few times without giving up. If you can't dust off your pants and climb back on, here's your zero.

7. Can you handle rejection? If your feelings are easily hurt, keep your day job because business is not for you. Many days in business, rejection waits around every corner and you must be able to handle rejection without letting it beat you down. You will experience rejection from customers, business partners, bankers, and investors, just to name a few.

8. Do you interact well with others? Being a business owner means that you will have daily interaction with a variety of folks, from your own employees to vendors to customers to investors. You must have ability to effectively manage people without offending them; ability to accept good advice from mentors and politely discount bad; ability to overlook mistakes or quietly rectify them; and one I have trouble with: ability to tolerate incompetence without losing your cool (but that's fodder for another column).

9. Do you have financial backing? The number one cause of business failure is a lack of money. Before you start your business you should have enough capital to see you through first year or until business can sustain itself. A good financial plan will include a number that ends in a few commas and a considerable number of zeroes.

10. Do you have experience in type of business you plan to start? We've talked about this before. If you can't locate your car's engine you have no business buying a Lube-N-Go franchise. The most successful business owners have prior experience in industry in which they have set up shop.

BONUS QUESTION. Have you ever started a business before? Prior business ownership is not a prerequisite, but it can't hurt. Many successful entrepreneurs have skeletons of past businesses hidden in their closet. Business is a lot like marriage: you learn a lot of things on first one that may come in handy second time around. You can see why I didn't go into marriage counseling…

Give yourself 10 points for every "Yes" answer and zero points for every "No." If "Yes" answers outweigh "No's," you just might have what it takes to back up your New Years resolution to start your own business.

If your answers lean heavily to "No" side, you might be better off working for someone else.

And that brings about another New Years Resolution that goes something like this: "This year I will get along with my boss…"

Here's to your success.

Tim Knox tim@dropshipwholesale.net For information on starting your own online or eBay business, visit http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net, an online organization dedicated to the success of online and eBay entrepreneurs.

Shopping Cart System. To accept online payments you must have what's called a "shopping cart system" that allows your customer to choose and purchase products. Adding a shopping cart system to your website can be simple or complex, cheap or very expensive. It depends on product you're selling and options you wish to offer your customers. As in everything, you get what you pay for.

A shopping cart system typically consists of three components: a product catalog, shopping cart, and a checkout/payment system. The product catalog is your inventory component and displays items you have for sale on website. The checkout/payment system is part of program that allows your customers to "add this to my cart," and checkout/ payment system is component that allows customer to checkout and pay for their purchase.

There is a wide variety of shopping cart software on market and price is dependent on features you want. Shopping cart systems range from simple HTML form insertions to full- blown catalog and inventory systems like those used by Amazon or Dell.

You can spend from zero to tens of thousands of dollars. Some of them you can set up on your site yourself while others should be set up by someone who knows what they're doing.

You can get a free Paypal.com shopping cart system which is most simplistic in nature, but easiest to implement. Using Paypal also alleviates need for a bank merchant account because everything is handled by Paypal, for a fee of course. You insert HTML forms into your website code and when an item is purchased.

There are also numerous online companies who will assist in setup of your ecommerce / credit card system. These companies charge several hundred to several thousand dollars for their services, so it would be wise for you to have an idea of exactly what you need before calling them into play.

Customer submits credit card. The site sends transaction to gateway. The gateway sends info to processor. The processor contacts issuing bank of customers credit card. The issuing bank returns result of processor. The processor routs result to gate. The gateway passes result to website. The website displays result.

One thing to remember when setting up an ecommerce system on your site is this: online it's all about security and privacy. Though online credit card processing has been around for years there are still many people who are uncomfortable giving their credit card number online. These are same folks that do not hesitate to give their credit card number over phone to a complete stranger or hand their credit card to a waiter who disappears with it for ten minutes. Online credit card processing is much less susceptible to fraud and abuse than either telephone processing or giving it to a waiter.

Eighty-five percent of internet users surveys said that a lack of security made them uncomfortable sending credit card information over Web.

It's up to you to instill a sense of security and make customer comfortable shoving their card into their computer.

Here's to your success.

Tim Knox tim@dropshipwholesale.net For information on starting your own online or eBay business, visit http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net, an online organization dedicated to the success of online and eBay entrepreneurs.