We all know how to start an online business, right? Sign up with Shopify, find some merchandise to sell and sit back while the sweet moolah rolls in. You could probably get that done in a morning without even changing out of your pajamas.
If only it was that easy.
There’s a lot more work to it than that. We’re currently finding that out for ourselves the hard way, as we’ve spent most of this month setting up an online business of our own.
Doing it has required a lot of time and energy – so much that this article is only going to be able to scratch the surface of what’s involved.
But amongst the chaos of trying to get this thing off the ground, we’ve managed to find a few minutes to put down a couple of the key thoughts and concerns we’ve been having.
The internet is one great big double-edged sword for business
We’ve all heard stories of people that made millions through online businesses started in their bedrooms.
But make no mistake, unless you hit some extremely rare luck, starting an online business is not a quick and easy way to make money.
The great thing about the internet is that you’re instantly connected with billions of people – all of them potential customers.
The flip side of that is that they’re already connected to millions of stores already selling stuff. And some of those stores have infrastructure, marketing, and budgets that are going to make your bedroom-based venture look pathetic in comparison.
Why would someone want to buy items from you when they can get exactly the same thing from Amazon?!
And all this leads to your first concern:
1. The very real worry that nobody is going to want your stuff
If you’re going to be trying to sell the same stuff as Amazon at the same prices then forget about it. It’s like trying to chat up women when your wingman is David Beckham. And you look like John Bercrow.
What you need is a different angle. Something fresh, something new. Do that and you stand a chance.
Maybe you’re offering entirely different products, maybe you can specialise, market differently or provide a customer experience which sets you apart.
Or maybe you’re just wasting your time?
The difficult thing is that only time will tell on whether your venture is a viable one. And that’s a really worrying thought when you’re shovelling dozens and dozens of hours of your time in to get your idea off the ground.
Sure, you can take steps to try to gauge your market, and do a bit of competitor research to work out if there’s a gap for what you’re offering. But nothing completely negates the massive, unquantifiable worry that all of your hard work might be for nothing. There’s always a chance your online store is just going disappear into the world wide wasteland and never be found by anyone.
Or worse, that you’re going to have to pour yet more work into it, with returns on your time not even touching minimum wage standards.
But you’ve got no choice right? You’re in too deep already, there’s no turning back now.
2. The expertise required is almost certainly more than you’ve got
If you’re setting up a business alone – and I’ll assume you’ve not got enough capital behind you to hire a team to do it all for you – you’re very much on your own.
You are the first and last point of responsibility for all departments in your venture. Marketing, sales, finance, legal, website design, and operational activities – you’re the head of them all.
Not even some of the clowns who go on The Apprentice, with their over-inflated egos, could realistically claim to be a master of all of those functions.
Whilst you shouldn’t be put off (others have done it so why can’t you?) this is going to be a big learning experience. And the trouble is, learning all this stuff is going to take you time. Doing it as a side project with a couple of hours here and there suddenly makes it seem like it’s going to take you years to launch.
Fortunately in our little venture there are 3 of us, so we’ve been able to share the load and bring our own expertise to the table. But it hasn’t been easy to do everything. Lots of times we’ve found ourselves aimlessly wondering how to complete tasks.
The problem is: the less you know, the longer it takes you to do things. Even simple things, like load a product onto your shopify account. It can be a pretty frustrating experience.
But again, where there’s a will there’s a way. As we’ve said before, making money isn’t easy – if it was, everyone would do it! Like us, you’re just going to have to learn these things.
3. How much money should you sink into setting up a business which you’re not sure will actually make any profit?!
You’re not going to set up an online business for free. If you want it to look at all professional, then you’re going to need to invest some money into it.
Whilst you don’t need to be sinking your life savings into an online business to get it off the ground, you are going to have to budget for an array of costs including website hosting, shopping platform costs, stock, marketing and logo design, amongst others.
It all starts to add up fast.
In our case we bought a ready-made business for something in the region of £300. That saved us a hell of a lot of effort, but there’s still a massive amount still to do, and fees to be paid.
Which brings you to the thought: just how much time and money should you sink into an online business when you don’t even know if it will ever make you any profit!?
When do you decide enough is enough and cut your losses?
I don’t have an exact answer to that, but in our case, we’re nowhere near hitting that point.
Our initial outlay has been modest, and we have an arrangement where we don’t really need to worry about stock – so we’re saving an enormous expense upfront.
Not only that, but we’re only a month in and still powering ahead full of optimism. Reality won’t start bite until we’ve actually opened the thing. Until then, we just need to make sure that optimism doesn’t turn into blissful ignorance, or denial, which causes us to spend beyond what’s sensible.
That’s unlikely to happen, as we’ve got 3 of us setting up our business to keep each other in check. For now, this one is just a nagging feeling in the back of our minds.
If there’s so much hassle involved, why bother setting up an online business in the first place?
Well, it’s not all downsides. Even though it has been hard work, it’s worth a go for the following reasons:
- If you want to make money you have to put in some effort
- With a little initial investment we might hit on something that is able to generate money for us in the long-run without huge amounts of time needed to be invested in future.
- At least you feel in control of this way of making money – more than can be said for the day job, where you’re probably taking instructions from your boss the whole time.
- Doing this as a group of 3 (in our case at least) has actually been pretty fun.
- We’re learning a lot!
- Even if it fails, at least we know it’s a dud idea and that’s another one off the list!
Only time will tell how this venture will pan out. Once we’ve got it off the ground, we’ll come back and provide an update on whether any of our worries came to fruition and ultimately whether all this work was worth it!
If you’ve started an online business, we could really use your tips. Can you relate to the above? Did things turn out better or worse than you hoped?