Internet has brought business opportunities to everyone. Starting a business has probably never been easier, and it can be done with very little initial capital. Some business models are even free to start, but that means you will have to work hard to succeed.
There are some benefits to online businesses, compared to ones that have physical stores or products. Here are some of them; let’s dive right into it.
Easily scalable
Online businesses are usually more easily scalable than regular businesses. You don’t have to expand your store building or hire more people in order to increase the sales of your digital product.
Scaling is also cheaper because of these reasons, and since online businesses have pretty much unlimited amounts of customers, and since shipping around the world is very easy nowadays, expanding has very little limits in some cases.
Always open to customers
Businesses that work online have their stores almost always open. Sometimes the site needs to be updated and because of that, it might be down for maybe an hour every now and then. You don’t have to worry about opening the doors for your customers every morning or missing something out because you have something else to do.
Your business is always open to your customers, as long as you have your website up. The initial setup of the website is also easier than opening a physical location, which includes renting and setting up the store. There is work to be done in online stores as well, but they can pretty much all be done from your living room couch or office.
Sometimes you don’t need any inventory
Online businesses don’t necessarily need any inventory themselves. There are two options for running online store without having any.
Dropshipping
The first one being dropshipping, which in a nutshell means you are selling someone else’s products through your own store, or someone else is managing the storage and shipping for your business.
Dropshipping has been a hot topic for the past few years, and I believe some people have made some money from it. I don’t have any experience in dropshipping, but I have studied it quite a bit.
Digital products
Another option to run an online business without having any inventory is to sell digital products. That might be a pre-recorded video course or an audio book. The options are unlimited when it comes to digital products. Only the sky is the limit when you start to plan your own online business.
Digital products are good, since selling an additional product doesn’t cost you almost anything. This way, you can spend really much money into marketing, and you can have huge margins on your products.
Let’s say you sell e-books for 10 dollars each. The costs of setting that book up were 300 dollars. No matter if you sell 1 book, 100 books or 1000 books, the costs are the same. You only have to sell 30 books to break even, after that, every sold book is purely profit. The initial costs are already paid, and you don’t have to print new copies of the book when you sell them.
Smaller costs than physical stores
Initial costs and running costs are usually lower in online stores compared to physical stores. You don’t have to pay high rent for a good location; you just buy a domain and hosting, which you can get for as low as twenty dollars per year.
Doing all the content for your site yourself and the product, the starting costs of your business are pretty much it, if you already have a computer and internet to work with.
Online businesses can have very high returns on investment, since the initial investment doesn’t have to be that big. You can either reinvest all the leftover money back into your business, to create new products or to market the current products better. This allows your business to scale way faster, because the return on investment can be so high.
Running your business online allows you to sell products with tighter margins as well. Since you don’t have to pay rent or utility bills for your store, you don’t have to make so much profit on each sold product.
Can be managed from anywhere
The last thing on my list is one of my favorites. You can manage your business from almost anywhere in the world. As long as you have a laptop or mobile phone with an internet connection, you can handle most of the work from anywhere.
Retiring early is a dream for some people and it has become more popular. You don’t have to even retire, if you have your online business that you can run from anywhere in the world, and you get to do what you enjoy.
If your business is well optimized, it can almost run by itself, and you can get all the work done within a few hours per week. That sounds almost better than retirement to me at least.
Final words
If you are planning on starting your own online business, I hope this post helped you towards starting one. The best time to start a business is today. There is still room for new products and new businesses on the market.
Be creative and get your ideas out of your head and start planning. I have a post about why you should do a business plan; you can read it here if interested.
Hopefully this was helpful to you, have a nice day.