How to Start a Successful Online Business – 6 Tips from Seasoned Pros

E-commerce business is now dominating over the market and becomes the most important strategy by which the owners develop their business.

According to U.S. Census data, e-commerce sales are increasing at a rate faster than traditional offline retail sales, raking in approximately $190 billion in sales in 2011. So it’s no surprise that budding entrepreneurs and existing “bricks and mortar” businesses are turning to e-commerce as a business opportunity.

You only need to browse the SBA.gov Community Discussion Boards to see how many topics focus on how to start an e-commerce business!

2015: The Age of Inventory Management Revolution

According to the Internet Retailer, more and more customers, especially B2B, are switching their purchasing and business managing style from traditional methods of book and paper to modern techniques of Internet and high-tech devices. Roughly from 2015 to 2018, the author estimates that more than 48% of B2B users will replace 50% old paper orders with modern online ones. This provoking assumption implies such a huge change in business management within only a small period of time. If this statement is held, e-commerce will soon dominate all over the business activity and becomes increasingly important in company making decision process. By moving to online market, store owners and business managers also seek towards a new trend of storing inventory information on the Internet, keeping track of it through inventory management software which reports effectively the inventory on hand, number of sales, orders, backorders, cost of goods sold and so on. In fact, with this new method of controlling inventory, customers can avoid making big mistakes attached with traditional-run business.

Why Let the Third Party Control Your Inventory System

Having the third party control your inventory brings you a lot of benefits

Nowadays, more and more companies use online channel as the most important way to sell their products and definitely they need to well control over their system. For small shops, it would be easier for them to keep track of their business activities because they have fewer quantity of product, thus the number of employees and customers. But as those shops grow into big companies, there will be more products to manage, the business owners have to put more effort on both satisfying the customer needs and keeping enough the inventory in their warehouse. In this situation, some companies will still remain the traditional inventory management system, using computer and human capital to handle business while others choose to let the third party control their inventory system by sophisticated online inventory management software.

Here are some advantages if a company uses third party inventory management software.

Tips for Building Good Relationship with Suppliers

Having a tense relationship with suppliers now becomes one of the most important strategies for any company

Having a tense relationship with suppliers now becomes one the most important strategies for any company. At some point in the past, we, as the business owners, might think that because we made orders, we certainly stood in the dominant position and can be demanding as much as we want. However, this is not true. This narrow-minded thinking causes a huge loss to our business; therefore, we need to build a really good relationship with the suppliers to fulfill our the development of our business.