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!

They might want to consider just starting out on Ebay.
Sell everything as "buy it now".
Low startup cost, but the transaction fees may add up.

it's seems like a lot easier than the other route. especially if you are not sure if thats something you want to get in to.

my .02

i'll get you a more detailed answer offlist, but the key components are:

1) secure shopping cart and credit-card transactions
2) shipping deals with UPS / FedEx / DHL including all the customs cr&p if there are international deliveries.

they've done the ebay thing a bit, weren't too impressed with it.
It fits with some of their used and trade-in items, but not with the big picture.

Paypal has a decent shopping cart system (free for business accounts)

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.

Give "www.ordermachine.com" a try.

I have many clients that use their wares. Comes with merchant acount (credit card)

If ya call their 800 number. Ask for Randy (Randy is a girl)

She is extrmely good at explaining how it works.

Twystd1

QUOTE (ArtechnikA @ Feb 25 2005, 02:54 PM)

i'll get you a more detailed answer offlist, but the key components are:

3 words:

inventory, inventory, inventory

the single biggest mistake people make when they plan that kind of switch is that they forget to factor in the time and manpower it'll need to switch their inventory over into a database.
pictures of each item, weight, dimensions, product descriptions, price, shipping & handling, categorizing all take A LOT of time ...

and when you're done, you'll need a person to keep it up to date!

shopping carts and webhosting are easy, but ...

- does the shopping cart tie into your database well?
- does it tie into accounting? trust me, you don't want to replicate all transactions manually into quickbooks.
- how are transactions fullfilled?
- customer support?
- invoicing?
- shipping? tied into the database as well?
- automatic alerts for stocked items that run low?
- how are backorders going to be handled?


in essence, there's A LOT more to it than the nice front end website your customers will see.
if all the components don't run like a well oiled machine, it'll be a complete nightmare!

btdt ...
Andy