Order fulfillment and your own products

If you have your own products or plan to offer a range of products that cannot be easily sourced elsewhere, you might also consider using an order fulfillment company as a way of expanding your business into other countries.
In this scenario, rather than buying your products in bulk from China, you would send your own products to appropriate order fulfillment facilities for onward transmission to customers in that part of the world.
However, even in this scenario, in order to achieve economies of scale that will make a significant difference to your ‘balance sheet’, you are going to have to ship the products that you are supplying to the order fulfillment house in bulk. Anything less and it will adversely affect your profits.

After this comes marketing…
The final thing that you need to give consideration to is how you’re going to market your site. It is essential, because even if you have the most attractive site in the world, and your product range is breathtaking beyond belief, you’re not going to sell anything unless potential customers can find your website.
In the same way that we worked our way through how you would plan your business in the earlier part of this report, you need to have a marketing plan in place before you start the whole business development process. There is no sense in plowing ahead with the development of your business, the creation of your website and finding suitable products that you can promote from your e-commerce site, if you have no idea how you are going to promote it once you have done all of it.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of information and advice about how to promote and market an e-commerce web site on the net.
Consequently, instead of regurgitating what you need to know, it is easier for you to follow these links directly:
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1075384972#
http://www.ecommerce-digest.com/internet-marketing-plan.html
http://www.plonka.com/website/contents/buildit.asp
http://www.access-ecom.info/article.cfm?id=53&xid=MN
http://www.webpractices.com/ebizstrategy.html

This report has taken you from the very beginning of the e-commerce website journey, and along the way has highlighted the essential elements of an e-commerce business plan, demonstrating what you should and shouldn’t do when you are building your website and how to find products that you can sell to turn your e-commerce dreams into a reality.
As I hope is clear by now, starting an e-commerce business is not difficult, but it does require a good degree of application and commitment. You have to be willing to put in the initial work, because if you do not, it is inevitable that your business will be built on foundations that will be shaky at best.
It is also important that you bear in mind that the whole thing is a step by step process, and you should not be tempted to try to shortcut or bypass any individual step of the process. Once again, doing so would endanger the whole of your business operation, and for the sake of a little additional time and effort, this is really not a chance that is worth taking.
The bottom line is, with all of the information, tools and resources that have been presented in this report, there is absolutely no reason why you cannot set up a successful e-commerce business starting right now. If you have read this far, you clearly have the determination and the willpower to carry this thing through, and you now have all the information that you need to enable you to do so.
Action is the key to taking your e-commerce plans to the next level, and there will never be a better time to start taking action than right now!