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Starting An Online Business Part 1 – Case Study
Neil McNulty
20th Aug, 2014 -
Small business owners wanting extra income streams or people wanting to become business owners look for something that they are interested in or something that is preexisting with little overheads and great profits. Finding such a business can be hard to find, hard to setup, have a lot of competition, little profits, hard to get funded due to the nature of the business or even require a lot of different skills.
Even after countless hours of doing research you may have no ideas or businesses which would suit your requirements (tick all of the boxes so to speak). Recently I had gone through this process myself. I decided I wanted to create a business that would involve little overheads to setup, must be an online business, require no real qualifications for a specific field (outside of selling and marketing skills), easy to turn into a residual income (always a must) and most importantly not interfere with the Suncoast Web Solutions and Suncoast Hosting work.
I even set some more specific requirements which I thought would be almost impossible to do, one of which was “MUST BE AN INDUSTRY WHERE YOU DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN THAT INDUSTRY”. This was a fairly tall ask given that so many industries have providers offering different levels of service, different qualities and more importantly all striving to do something different.
I was very picky and even got to the point where I believed this business may not be possible to find. It was starting to look like this list was too ambitious. Then randomly I found one which had a few things going for it. There was a few issues with it which included things like heavily populated and extremely competitive, had a massive market that was very picky and very close knit vendor community.
After doing a bit of thinking about the business and what its benefits were I actually started to tick a few other requirements which I had set as a part of it. The biggest thing that I had going against me was how could I do something different. After a bit of thinking I came back to something we already did and that was a subscription styled service.
Website hosting is really a subscription based service and the one great thing about that is that I actually had a fair bit of experience in that industry. The only thing that was different was the product. After doing research I discovered here in Australia there is almost ZERO competition in this market and the competition in the marketplace were very restrictive. The first thought was “WOW this is possible and it is achievable” and “I think this could really take off”.
This then led me to getting the business setup and underway. The first thing I decided to do differently in this industry was utilising all of the payment methods possible. Most only offered paypal or credit card only. I decided lets make it so that this new business would offer Credit Card, PayPal and Direct Deposit via Internet Banking.
The second big thing was to give more payment options. Instead of having the option of quarterly or monthly I decided we would go 1 step further. The business would offer monthly, quarterly, 6 monthly and annually.
The third issue I discovered was frequency was an issue as most places offered fortnightly or monthly. This had to change… and it did… to weekly, fortnightly, and monthly.
There is still more! The next big issue I discovered was shipping costs. Unless you spent over $100 most places would charge extra for shipping. Not going to happen with this business. Shipping Australia wide MUST be free for customers.
Finally there was one last bug bear which came to light which was sizes! Most places offered 250g or 500g per delivery. A few offered 1kg per delivery but that was rare. It was decided you need to be able to buy what suits you best. I decided the best way to do this was offer 250g, 500g, 1kg, 2kg, 3kg, 4kg and 5kg per delivery! No one else does that in the industry.
After about 5 or 6 months of getting everything setup and working with various technologies and providers I setup the business. The great thing is that all of the issues I identified have now become a standard for the business. Customers have also said that they feel the website is easy to use and works as described.
Now after keeping you in suspense for the whole article you can check out the website and if you are a coffee lover or know one, you can order through the website your next batch of freshly roasted coffee. The business is called “WeSend Coffee” and the website is visible at http://www.wesendcoffee.com
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