5 Tips For Running A Successful Online BusinessWritten by Ron Swerdfiger
5 Tips For Running A Successful Online BusinessBy Ron Swerdfiger http://www.hostingforum.ca There are a couple of key things to look at when starting an online business. I’m not here to give you “hidden secrets,” just a few fundamental tips to get you started. Basically there are five major factors to look at provided you have products and/or resources. 1. Enjoy what you are doing! It will make all difference in world if you actually enjoy what you are offering your customers. A large number of online businesses are started purely for profit and nothing else. This is usually shown in their business practice. The quality of your work will be much greater provided you enjoy subject. Online or on a street, your business should be run with an underlying interest in product or service. 2. Site design is first thing a prospective customer sees!! I have seen some horrible designs. If you think putting some text up, a couple links and a logo on a page is enough, you will likely fail before you even realize. You will also notice a lot of companies have a generic template that can be found online at templetemonster or any other template site. Avoid these. It is very hard to develop a company image when you look like 134,000 other companies. I suggest you put a bit of effort and creativity into a well designed "professional" looking home page for your company. The bottom line is a new customer will not even consider buying anything from you, if they feel you are an armature no matter how great your services are or how cheap your products might be. 3. Develop your website as a total package to your customers. Don't just present your products and leave it at that. Offer tutorials, articles, support forums etc. These additional services not only provide additional content for you customers, but if developed correctly, will bring additional traffic to your site which will potentially lead to more sales.
| | ERP Software Financing: the future? – overview for company ownerWritten by Andrew Karasev
In our case – we serve Microsoft Business Solutions ERP and CRM products: Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, Navision, Microsoft RMS, as well as we do customization and integration to these products. We would like to share with you our experience with financing through Microsoft Financial Corporation, entity handling software financing for Great Plains, CRM, Solomon, Navision & Axapta. •0% interest financing. Well – this is probably a dream or something that should not be practiced (otherwise you compromise MRP list price). However, considering nature of software – this is something that costs nothing to sell – assuming that all software development expenses and costs are already behind. From time to time Microsoft Business Solutions practices this 0% financing. Right now (June 2005) new customers are enjoying this promotion •Increasing Number of Clients – who use financing. Last year we saw clients who were trying to increase their market share, by fueling their efforts with financing of all kinds, including MBS financing. This year we see regular clients, who are using financing just to stabilize cash flow. Some of these clients have enough cash to purchase system, but they still finance. •Car vs. House financing. This is classical American dilemma. In my personal opinion – you can not pay upfront price of real estate, so you use mortgage to finance you house. However, again this is my personal opinion – car financing is something you should probably stay away from, because car loses value as you leave dealership place – you can not sell car on your own for same or similar price. Software is very challenging asset – from one side – ERP might be something your business get he market value on, from another side – if it is not implemented or implemented only half of way – it might be burden. Maybe you, as business owner have to do your homework long evening and weekend hours to decide on your MRP financing.
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