Before you decide whether the time is right to bring your retail business online, it’s best to firstly consider the advantages and find out if they outweigh the disadvantages when applied to your business.

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For business owners that have yet to bring their retail business online, it can be a daunting prospect. You will have to recruit a web developer, or appoint an agency; you will have to fulfil orders going all over the world; and you’ll have to ensure that you get enough online customers to cover your costs. While there are certainly lots of things to think about, and lots to do, the results can be very rewarding if you manage to do it right.

The Advantages Of Bringing Your Retail Business Online

Before you decide whether the time is right to bring your retail business online, it’s best to firstly consider the advantages and find out if they outweigh the disadvantages when applied to your business.

• Investors do not have a lot of confidence in offline retail businesses at the moment. That’s why it can be best to be in the online game as early as possible. Investors feel that more dollars will move online as customers become more confident about online shopping. Through having a position online you will be able to capitalise on this growing market.

• The market opportunity is so much larger for a smaller initial capital investment. Getting a website designed will probably cost less than a years rent for your shop, and the costs are very low on an on-going basis for hosting and domain registration. For this small amount you will get an opportunity to compete in a global marketplace.

• You will be able to save money on costs that you can’t avoid offline. You will be able to save on retail expenses such as rent and sales assistants’ wages. You will also not have to have physical goods on display, and that means you will be able to decrease the amount of stock that you will have to hold.

• You will be able to migrate some of your offline customers online, and you will be able to save money immediately. You will be able to save on costs straight away, and you may even choose to pass some of these savings back to the customer in the form of lower prices. Unlike some e-commerce businesses, you will be able to leverage your offline retail presence to work online.

The Advantages Of Bringing Your Retail Business Online

Here are some the disadvantages to bringing your offline business online with an e-commerce website.

•You will have to compete with businesses all over the world. You will no longer have a local monopoly, if you have that at the moment. This means that you may have to end up charging less online than you do offline in order to succeed. In doing this you may cannibalise your offline business.

•While you will find that many costs of sale will shrink, like staff wages and rent apportionment, you will now have to pay some expenses that you will not have to at the moment. This includes outbound carriage, internet marketing, hosting, web design fees, and more card processing fees.

Are you looking to get out of the rat race? Want to start a mobile phone business but not sure where to start? Here is a quick look at some of the things you might want to consider before striking out on your own.

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So your job seems to be going nowhere and this current recession has you worried. What are your options?

You could look for yet another position at yet another firm, with the hope that it will be marginally better than the one you have now and that you will actually move up the corporate ladder instead of sideways. Or you could start to build your own business on the side and have something to go to when you are ready.

Becoming self-employed has been the dream of many people for a very long time. After all, when there’s millions willing to join the rat race there must be an equally large group who want to leave it behind.

So how do you do that and what field do you choose? Which money making venture you chose depends on what you think you will do well at. There are almost as many different ways of starting your own business as there are people in the world.

Selling things online or through bricks and mortar businesses has often been the way many people choose to make money for themselves. One good product line to select could be the cell phone. In short, start a mobile phone business.

Why start a mobile phone business?

While the world is in recession right now and consumers aren’t buying as much as they used to consumer electronics have managed to buck this trend… handset sales will grow by 3% in the US and Europe next year with developing markets like South America, Asia and Africa achieving much stronger growth in wireless cell phone sales.

People still want to keep in touch with each other when times are tough and if you start a mobile phone business that is online or through eBay then phones are fairly easy to ship to different countries due to their small size and light weight and cellular phones will not incur the huge duties that some other, higher profile items attract.

How can I sell mobile phones?

You can sell cellular phones any number of ways. By opening up your very own bricks and mortar cell phone store, stocking GSM phones, CDMA phones and cell phone accessories or utilize the classified section in newspapers and magazine.

There are also a number of ways online to start a mobile phone business, including opening your own online cell phone shop, marketing cellular phones through online classified sites like Craigslist.org or through online auction sites like eBay and Amazon.

How do I know which cell phones you should sell?Selecting the unlocked cell phone to stock on your online store when you start a mobile phone business is a difficult job as there is such a wide range of unlocked mobiles available these days.

While I will talk about the different shapes and types of unlocked phone, their various benefits and problems and the types of people who buys each type of mobile in another article it very much depend on the types of people who use your service.

It doesn’t matter whether you choose to stock a bar phone, flip phone, clamshell phone, ladies phone, slide cellular phone, flip cell phone or PDA. And you will succeed just as well if you get a movie phone, a music phone or one that lets you watch videos on phone. There are two things to make sure of… that you get phones that will work in the markets that you are selling them to and you buy unlocked cell phones.

All cellular networks around the world work within the frequencies 850MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz with some networks operating on two or more frequencies. As a result most phones available wholesale operate on two, three or four bands.

Matching the ideal phone band to the market is essential for people who want to start a mobile phone business as it will be the difference between a phone that works and a phone that doesn’t. If you have people buying unlocked phones from all over the world you are better selling quad band cell phones as these international phones will give you the coverage you need.

What is the difference between a locked and unlocked phone and why should I buy unlocked cell phones?

A locked cell phone is one that is sold by a particular carrier and cannot be changed to another server unless the carrier themselves do it. For example, if you have an iPhone or a Blackberry, you are an AT&T customer and you want to use Verizon’s service then you have to call up AT&T and ask them to switch you to Verizon. Most locked cell phones are CDMA phones.

Unlocked cellphones don’t come attached to a carrier so you can select which carrier you use. These are almost always GSM phones as the GSM SIM can be removed from unlocked GSM phones allowing another to be put in.

So why choose to sell unlocked cell phones over locked cell phones? The simple answer is when you start a mobile phone business then you’re not going to have much money and you won’t want to pay the licensing fee necessary to buy network-approved phones. And with unlocked phones you’re able to buy phones wholesale which give you more profit and more freedom to run the business the way you want.

Where can I find cell phones to sell?Sourcing products is one of the biggest headaches of anybody involved in e-commerce and buying unlocked cell phones is no different.

If you want to find unlocked cell phones you can look in several areas, from a local wholesale company, from a wholesale importer in bulk lots on sites like eBay and overstock or through wholesale dropship companies that stock China cellphones wholesale. As cellphones and most electronics come from China these days this would probably be a logical step. Thankfully many of these wholesale dropship firms are online these days.

Growing your MLM business online is going to become VERY popular over the next few years. Business owners can acquire targeted MLM leads from various sources. The most convenient sources are the companies that compile and sell lead lists. The business owner, however, should be careful when choosing a lead list source, as some may be fraudulent.

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Some targeted MLM leads are identified through telephone interviews or direct mail response. Business owners can also obtain targeted leads from promotional give-away programs that have high traffic. Usually a person will fill out a simple survey to claim the promotional item, and the business owner can then use the survey to assess whether he or she will be a quality lead. Once you know your MLM home based business inside and out, you’re ready to start generating those MLM leads. The best types of leads are fresh which are hours old or leads that are no more than 90 days old. MLM Leads have become a key component of building a downline. If this is the case, they probably do not have a great listening pattern established. But if they do listen to you, ask questions, and then ask more questions that make sense to ask, then you have found a potential gold mine for recruiting and building an organization. Buying MLM leads is one of the most popular wayw to generate leads for your MLM home based business. A prospects that have expressed an interest in becoming distributors are known as Targeted MLM Leads. What is an MLM Lead? And why would you need an MLM lead to work? In Network Marketing, many times we run out of warm market, or we simply do not have many friends in an area. MLM leads help you to find people that are interested in a Network Marketing Home Business. They have called in either off of an ad, or maybe off of an internet site, and indicated they have an interest in a home based business. All around the internet there are mlm lead companies who are selling everything from real time leads all the way to 45 day old leads. Within any large company, someone will be able to provide you information on MLM leads suppliers. It doesn’t matter much where you get them or what category they are classified under, if you don’t contact the MLM leads that you have, they simply will not sign up under you.