Anyone who owns a business is in the business of selling something. Be that a physical product, a digital product, a service, or what have you: sales is the name of the game.

Today’s internet-powered life makes it easy for anyone to buy anything from anywhere in the world. You can go online and buy your favorite brand of soda from when you were growing up that they don’t sell in your area. You can find that rare vinyl LP you’ve been looking for for years. If you have the budget, you can even buy yourself a yacht, a jet, or your own private island!

The question for your business then becomes, “does it make sense to sell my offerings online?”

Before making this decision, you have some things to consider. There are so many they could make your head spin, so we’ll focus on a few essentials.

Time and expense

To set up an online store properly will, at the very least, take some of your time and will incur some expense. Does it make sense to invest those things to get a store running?

You could torture this to death, think about all the things that could go wrong, and never take action. Usually the best starting point is to try something on a small scale, and if it works, grow it into something bigger.

Self-hosted or managed

Once you’ve made the decision to go forward, you need to decide where you’re going to sell. Will you set up your own Web site with your own domain (self-hosted)? Or will you sell on one of the bigger marketplace sites like Etsy, Ebay, or Amazon (managed)?

For a hobbyist or a business with very little capital, a managed solution may be best to start with. Payments are processed through someone else’s site, which takes away that burden for you the store owner; at the same time, you’re rather limited in what you can control. As one example, your customers will be seeing Etsy’s logo every time they buy from you, and not your own, so your brand awareness suffers.

Self-hosted sites give you much more control and flexibility, but also bring more work and liability. It’s a trade-off, but in the end a self-hosted site makes the most sense for a business that’s serious about selling online.

---

This post kicks off a series on e-commerce. In the next few weeks we’ll delve deeper into the world of selling online. From here on we’re working under the premise that you’ve decided to sell online, and you’re going the self-hosted route.

Next week we’ll look at choosing the platform that’s right for your business.

Photo Credit: Steve Snodgrass via Compfight cc