A Reliable Shift
Part of properly shifting a physical store to the web will require effective online marketing which effectively and continuously yields necessary results. Certainly, that’s easy to say, but it’s much more difficult to effect, and will more than likely require a gradual approach. It makes sense to do the requisite research beforehand to help ensure the results you seek.
It will become quickly apparent that an effective e-commerce solution must be put into place. The best e-commerce solution will have features employed to encourage sales. Many of those features will concern aesthetic requirements for proper sales. Something that can definitely help you find the success you seek will be proper payment processing.
Check out this infographic of credit cards used by celebrities; in the preface to it, the website who has hosted it, ExpertSure.com, points out: “Business owners who take payments using a credit card machine…occasionally look…in the face of a famous celebrity, film star, or political powerhouse.”
Accordingly, you want to be able to handle the business of such celebrities! Sometimes a single sale can result in the kind of results necessary for the maintenance of your online solution. Knowing the credit cards such high-profile clients are likely going to use can help you structure your payment acceptance solutions properly.
A Hard Reality
Still, you’re not going to see the results you seek by only marketing, designing your online e-commerce store accordingly, and properly processing the payments of high-profile clients. Statistically, sales from these individuals will necessarily only define a small portion of sales.
There are a lot of numerical rules that have been observed which define this reality. There is, for instance, the 80/20 rule. This is a concept which states that 20% of something will have a greater effect than 80% of a similar something. This rule applies in terms of teamwork, sales, employees—the list goes on. Two out of ten workers will do the most work, etc.
If that’s not enough, look at the distribution of wealth throughout the world. The top 1% of wealth holders have more resources than the other 99%. But that doesn’t mean 99% of people are impoverished, and 1% are rich. It’s a distribution that, when mapped out, will very likely exhibit a pyramidal shape. The base will be those lacking wealth, the tip will be those with most of it.
In sales, you’re going to experience the same thing, so it makes sense to target that minute portion of your clientele. But if you forget the base from which that target is defined, you’re not going to experience the success you seek. So your first order of business will be establishing that foundational, reliable base.
The Value Of A Dependable Profit Base
A physical store often provides just this quality of operations. A “bottom line” is established, and from there, developments can occur. When you’ve got one base ironed out, then you can focus on establishing a secondary base, and once the secondary base is established, you can make a tertiary one effective, etc.
This is what many refer to in terms of diversification, and it will require risk. But calculated risk can make it so that should your venture on one hand fail, it doesn’t prohibit the existing venture of your other hand from succeeding. What you need is expansion capital.
A business is much like a shark. Obligate ram ventilators are sharks which cannot properly respire unless they are moving forward. Forward motion is that which keeps the organic engine of their body properly functional.
This isn’t the case with all sharks, but great whites, some of the most well-known, have this quality.
Think of your business like a great white which requires profitable forward momentum to survive. Should an outreach or diversification venture slow this momentum, you will get dangerously close to stopping the engine of profit, and so killing your business. Accordingly, that which you pursue must be designed such that if it fails, it won’t halt that momentum.
Calculated Risks In Action
A calculated risk in forwarding development has put the variables together such that mathematically, should things not succeed as they should, your business can go another direction without losing its foundational base.
Establish how much money is necessary, in terms of income, to maintain the baseline. Then figure out what your minimum costs will be in the expansion, and maximum impact should that expansion fail. Once you have these figures ironed out, then it becomes time to enact e-commerce strategies.
You should expect that for some time profit won’t be experienced by secondary ventures designed to expand a business. Calculate loss, as though profit will not come, and you’ll be able to continuously absorb it until things turn around and allow you to funnel more resources to a newly successful forward strategy.
Easier Said Than Done, But Not Impossible
Again, these things are much easier said than they are affected. Still, once a secondary base is established, you’ll be on your way to putting a dependable third base into operations, and a fourth. The more of these dependable profit solutions you can put into place, the more you’ll be able to expand.
What you’ve got to do is be patient, and this may be the most difficult thing of all. By nature people are impatient, and as a business owner, you certainly understand both how difficult it is to avoid impatience, and how easy it is to jump the gun.
