OT- Turning a Brick&Morter into, an online business Options

[seanery]

My cousin's side of the family has owned a small business since 1951.
It's a retail shop of sorts. It's very low tech. I was over there today
with my brother and we started thinking about what it would take
to make the store work online as well as the Brick & Morter.

There is no database file of inventory, etc...

Other than a domain and a hosting company, what would it
take for them to sell their wares online?

thanks!

[lapuwali]

There are a number of online storefront businesses now, that do hosting, all of the system management for you, and have all of the online tools required to build a complete site in a point and click manner, complete with a secure shopping cart and a credit card processing backend. For people with zero or near-zero computer experience, this kind of thing is likely to be the most successful. Some of these places even have things like full support for online coupons and gift certificates, and marketing data analysis tools. Most of them make money by taking a cut of each transaction as well as a monthly fee. This is still usually a better deal than Ebay, though, depending on the level of traffic you run through the site.

Not having any current online inventory is probably not a bad thing. Getting data from one system into another can often be so maddening it's sometimes easier to just re-enter the data by hand, as tedious as that may be.