Get an online presence

What should be your next step once you have all your products transformed into e-catalog? Naturally, you need to have an online presence to sell products. There are number of options how to do this.

Become a member of an e-marketplace

This could be a large geography oriented fairly large horizontal market or a vertical e-marketplace specific to your industry. The membership fees are in most of cases not so expensive. But many of them charge some percentage on your transactions, usually, from 1 to 3 percent. If you expect big sales volume, you may think this might not be best choice for you. However, if you get new customers, thanks to your mere presence in an e-marketplace, percentage that you have to pay on transaction you should consider as customer acquiring cost. Under any circumstances, it is good to become a member of at least one e-marketplace as you -automatically get exposed to thousands of new prospective customers.

Build a website

There are several ways you can construct an e-commerce site to your need.

You can build a website in house by employing developers or you can hire a web development company to do this for you. The advantage is you can have a website with look, feel and functionality according to your given specification.

However, both of these methods could be way costly for a small business. Average cost of building an e-commerce website runs starting from US$ 600 plus hosting and maintenance charges for a miniscule site with limited features to several hundred thousand US Dollars for a powerful e-commerce website.

Another option that you have as a small business is to build an e-commerce site from prefabricated templates. While this is affordable and easy, you considerably lose flexibility and customization possibilities in comparison to building a site from scratch.

Build a web store

All these above mentioned cases do not allow you to have potentials and advantages that come with an e-business website integrated with a B2B exchange. Which means, whether you are a business to consumer company with occasional sales to businesses or you are a pure play B2B company, a Web Store merged into an e-marketplace is what you need.

A web store from a B2B exchange gives you best of both worlds. You are having a professional e-commerce site which incorporates all features that an e-marketplace has to offer. And you build a site from simple and easy to edit templates.

For a detailed information about features that come with a web store and benefits that you can get from them, follow this link: Powerful E-business Store

You may wonder how they swindle people.

There are various ways that crooks rip off their victims. Some of most commons ones of them are described below:

They will ask you to open a bank account under their name. On their second step, they will ask you to deposit a sum of say US$ 10000 to that account, explaining if account does not have any decent amount, officials those who are responsible for transferring promised millions of dollars would become suspicious and won’t authorize transaction. Once you deposited asked sum, they simply withdraw it and disappear. Usually they choose a bank where they might have some connections. So you, after losing your money, do not get any help from bank either.

They will ask you to send some merchandize or gifts for officials they need to bribe in order to make transactions of assumed millions of dollars smoothly. Naturally, you never hear from them once you sent requested gifts to their address.

We even heard stories like this one: A man was persuaded to come to Nigeria to look after transaction by himself. Over there he was kept hostage until he shifted all his liquid assets to thugs.

Looking at increasing quantity of scam emails that we receive, this only convinces that many fall for this seemingly simple trap. According to FBI these swindlers have defrauded millions of dollars from gullible people.

There could be other variations of this scam, next time you read an email that feels suspicious, just delete it! There are other ways of making money!

Some words of cautions! Although most of these scams originate from African countries, please do not generalize and consider that all companies form these countries are bad. As usual a few people are responsible for tarnishing reputation of a country.