Micro Business for Teens » Running a Micro

Building a Web-Based Store

Carol Topp, CPA — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:00:06 +0000

6 Tips for Building a Web-Based Store

By TY MCMAHAN

Four years ago, Jared Madsen started a company that makes bicycles built for five. He sold his bikes—which had two wheels and a rear bucket big enough to tote four children—wholesale to shops around the country.

But today, 90% of sales at his small business, Madsen Cycles, in Murray, Utah, come from an online store that took his Web designer half a day to embed within his company’s website.

The company’s bikes are now sold by him directly to consumers for about $1,485 apiece, at what he describes as a “way higher profit.” He declines to specify his markups.

Mr. Madsen says he initially thought the online store would just fill in “holes” where he didn’t have distribution. But the benefit to him in the end, he adds, was that the Web store made it possible for him to dramatically reduce his reliance on third-party shops.

As a result, the online store is now his business’s main source of income.

Have a company website? If you’re not using it to sell your goods or services, then you could be losing out on an opportunity to boost your company’s bottom line.

Forrester Research says online shopping has surged in recent years and is continuing to grow. U.S. online retail sales, which rose 12.6% to $176.2 billion in 2010, are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10% through 2015, the research firm reports.

Building an ecommerce platform within your company website doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. A number of new services—such as such as Goodsie, Shopify, Storenvy and Weebly—now make the task easy and affordable. You can use these services to design a store, upload product, create shopping carts, manage fulfillment and more, —all for as little as a few dollars a month.

Older platforms such as eBay and Etsy allow merchants to sell direct to consumers with benefits such as built-in site traffic. But these new services give merchants more control over the look and feel of their online stores.

“I wanted to have some sort of online presence or shop, but I thought it would be too much work and I couldn’t do it on my own,” says Kimberly Lash, who uses Goodsie to sell vintage clothing at ShopAmour.com. “I thought eBay felt like just selling clothes. You couldn’t build a brand or company. There’s tons of traffic and people are already going to the site, but you can’t create a brand.”

The cost to use the new Web-store services ranges from as little as $5 up to $179 a month. Both Storenvy and Weebly are “freemium” services, offering the basic platform for no charge. The services can be free because the platforms make their money selling additional features, such as more storage. Storenvy charges monthly fees of $4.99 to link a store’s own domain name and $2.99 for a discount code feature. Weebly charges $5 to link a domain name. Goodsie offers the first month for free, then a flat $15 each month for all features.

The Shopify platform is the most feature-packed and also the priciest. The company charges $29 a month and a 2% transaction fee for all e-commerce features and up to 100 products. The company says its most popular offering is $99 plus a 1% transaction fee and up to 10,000 products.

We spoke to executives at Goodsie, Shopify, Storenvy and Weebly, as well as Tom Davis, global head of e-commerce at footwear and apparel company Puma.

Based on their suggestions, here are our tips for using these services to create an online store:

1. Invest time, and possibly money, in taking good photos.

Photography is the “dirty little secret” of e-commerce, according to Mr. Davis. “[Customers] can’t touch and feel your wares, so your photography needs to be an important element.”

Merchants should professionally photograph as many details of a product as they can afford.

Goodsie Chief Executive Jonathan Marcus recommends shooting each product individually, as well as while it’s being worn or used by a model, in order to show how big the product is.

2. Use a voice that matches your brand.

“There’s a fine line between cute and strategic,” says Mr. Davis. For example, a flower shop may describe marigolds as “perfect for fall and a favorite for moms,” while an electronics store may provide a more technical description of products. Merchants should also consider how their descriptions might surface in search-engine results, he adds.

3. Experiment with the layout, and mix it up.

The new services, which emerged within the past five years, provide hundreds of templates for the arrangement of products on the page, as well as a wide variety of different colors and fonts. “Change things every two to three weeks over three months and see what drives the best results,” Mr. Davis says.

Goodsie’s Mr. Marcus adds that stores need to be thoughtful about what products fit together on a page. For example, an apparel company may consider arranging items that make up an entire outfit.

4. Figure out the payment gateway.

This is the trickiest part of creating an online store, according to Mr. Davis. Store owners will need to set up a merchant account with a bank to link funds from the credit card company or a third-party processor like PayPal, which lets customers use its merchant account under certain terms, usually with very little setup required. PayPal does not charge a setup fee.

Currently, Weebly stores only accept Paypal or Google Checkout to process payments. Goodsie offers those services, as well as Braintree Inc. and Authorize.net, a Visa Inc. company, to accept credit card payments. Shopify offers dozens of payment options.

PayPal accepts all major credit cards with no setup or monthly fees. The service takes a 2.9% fee per transaction on monthly sales up to $3,000. The rate reduces as monthly sales increase. Google Checkout charges the same. Authorize.net charges a $100 set-up fee, a $20 monthly fee and 10 cents per transaction. Most services charge about $10 per chargeback in the event a refund is issued.

5. Try to make online shopping feel like an experience.

“Do you have the right boxes? Do you have packing foam? How do you want merchandise to be presented when your customer opens the box? Remember, that’s the only one-on-one you’re going to have with a customer,” Mr. Davis says. He suggests offering gift wrapping and sending hand-written thank-you notes to add a more personal touch to the e-commerce experience.

Alternatively, you can outsource fulfillment. Shopify integrates with third-party fulfillment services such as Fulfillment by Amazon, Shipwire and Webgistix. The cost of this can range for tens of dollars into the thousands depending on the product and volume of shipping. Those who choose to outsource fulfillment should do several trial orders with a service before committing to a provider, Mr. Davis suggests.

6. Promote heavily.

With the growth of social media, these e-commerce platforms have baked in Facebook and Twitter integration so the store and individual products can be “Liked” and tweeted across the social networks. This requires registering for those services separately. The e-commerce platforms will ask the usernames and passwords of those separate services to sync the store. Gaining a following on services like Facebook and Twitter is a good way to alert customers to new products or specials, and to gain customer feedback, and potentially evangelism.

Goodsie and Storenvy have tools to “port” an entire store to Facebook, enabling shopping directly through the social network. They say the process is as simple as installing an application and all products are automatically imported into a Facebook store. Store owners lose some control over the look of their store on Facebook, of course, however.

Storenvy also combines all stores built on the platform into one big marketplace. It claims its stores are making almost 15% of their sales through the marketplace rather than through direct traffic. Goodsie also plans to launch a similar marketplace.

A similar version of this story appeared previously in Dow Jones VentureWire.

Write to Ty McMahan at ty.mcmahan@dowjones.com

From The Wall Street Journal

Carol Topp, CPA

Business tips on video

Carol Topp, CPA — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:00:20 +0000

Need quick tips to start your micro business?

You have got to visit SBTV.com, Small Business TV.

It’s full of short videos on all kinds of micro business topics like:

Marketing
Money
Technology
Green business
Legal
Internet business
Success stories

These videos are geared toward grown ups, not teenagers, so don’t be overwhelmed. Listen to a few videos; you never know what could apply to your micro business!

Here’s a few to start out:
Small Business Taxes

Social Media Tricks for Your Small Business

Legal Issues for Home-Based Businesses

Make sure to check out my book series, Micro Business for Teens.

Carol Topp, CPA

What Do Teens Think of Email?

Carol Topp, CPA — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:52:40 +0000

Data and infographic by AWeber Email Marketing

How to Raise an Entrepreneur

Carol Topp, CPA — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 17:53:22 +0000

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article titled “How to Raise an Entrepreneur.”

One commenter, who owns his own engineering firm, asked:

Nice, but how do you prepare them for the IRS paper, 941′s and 940′s, (withholding and federal unemployment), w-2s and w-3s, (employee reporting and employer reporting for SS and Medi)? Don’t forget the 1120′s (corporate tax filing).

Duplicate ALL of this at the state level and add Business Entity Taxes, Sales and Use tax filing,and filing the annual report with fee. If your S corp is in two states duplicate this for the foreign filings (out of state). Add the agent for the foreign S corp.

Then we get to the insurances. Property and liability, workers comp and if there is any money left, health insurance. and the list goes on, all for a 1-5 person S Corp.

Guess that there was a point in this list and that would be to give our kids a business environment that is conducive to conducting business.

Scott P. (used with permission)

Scott is correct there can be alot of paperwork, IRS forms and state laws for a micro businesses owner to understand.

But it’s not impossible.

My reply to Scott:

How do you prepare them? A little at a time.

I recommend that a teenager start a micro businesses as a sole proprietorship (not a corporation or partnership) with no employees (so no 941s, w-2, etc.) . I also recommend service businesses, not product sales, to (usually) avoid sales tax. If they do want to sell a product, they will learn a lot and apply math skills to calculating the sales tax. It’ll be good for them.

Finally, I recommend they create home-based businesses and I find they can usually get an insurance rider on their parents’ homeowner policy, if needed at all.

If students learn basic business skills as a teenager, they won’t be as overwhelmed when starting a small business as an adult.

I agree with your final comment and I do hope some of these teenagers grow up and try to change the business environment. I’d like to see more small business owners run for public office or influence legislation.

Carol Topp, CPA
Author Micro Business for Teens

Make record keeping a breeze

Carol Topp, CPA — Thu, 19 May 2011 00:38:16 +0000

I’ll be giving a session on Making Record Keeping a Breeze for the 2011 Ultimate Women’s Expo on Thursday May 19 at 2: 00 pm EST

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How young entrepreneurs balance business and school

Carol Topp, CPA — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:29:24 +0000

My friend Jack at Teen Business Forum has 20 students share how they balance running a business and schoolwork. Some are college students, but many are teenagers in high school.

They do things like

plan ahead,
wake up early,
work late,
work while others play,
set goals and
manage their time.

How Young Entrepreneurs Balance Business And School

People always talk about work-life balance. Well, with young entrepreneurs, it’s more of work-school balance. Here’s how some student entrepreneurs were able to balance their school work and the company they were running on the side. It’s more like the the company they were running and classes they were attending to on the side.

Read more…

If they can do it, so can you!

Carol Topp, CPA

Really Cool Business Cards

Carol Topp, CPA — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:49:38 +0000

Most teenage micro businesses need a business card to hand out to potential customers.

One of the best sources for cheap (or even free if you use of of their stock designs and don’t mind their ad on the back of the card) business cards is Vistaprint.com. They are an on-line printer and can put your name and logo on anything. I’ve used them for my business cards, letterhead, banners and more. I’ve been 100% satisfied with Vistaprint.com

I also found a designer that has some gorgeous designs for business cards. She designed a really cool card for babysitters.

She has an entire teen entrepreneur series of business cards.

Go to the Greek Cookie’s website to see her other business card designs.

Micro Tips for Micro Businesses:Smile!

Carol Topp, CPA — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:00:09 +0000

Micro Tips for Micro Businesses

Today’s tip: Service with a smile

There are hundreds of books written about customer service and many of them offer tips and “secrets” to serving customers. The only secret is to treat your customers with respect and give them what they paid for. That’s pretty simple, so why are their hundreds of books written about customer service? Because there are hundreds of ways to show respect and to serve a customer.

Smile! A smile can really make you seem friendly, warm and caring. Friendly people attract people.
Shake hands. Offer your hand when first meeting a potential customer. This might make you feel uncomfortable because teenagers don’t usually shake hands, but watch adults in the business world. They frequently offer their hand when being introduced. Practice on friends or your family if you need to get comfortable shaking hands.
Look them in the eye. Making eye contact shows confidence if even you don’t feel confident! Looking directly at someone also is a sign of respect (if you’re not staring!).

I was giving a workshop on teenagers and micro businesses at a homeschool convention when a 12 year old boy came up to me after the program, extended his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Jack. I really liked your presentation.” I was immediately impressed by Jack because he offered his hand to me. Although he was young and very small in stature, I knew in an instant that this young man would be good at whatever he set his mind. Adults are very impressed by a handshake and a smile.

Carol Topp, CPA

http://MicroBusinessForTeens.com

Find Micro Business for Teens on Facebook!

Teen entrepreneurs offer tips to peers

Carol Topp, CPA — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:47:45 +0000

USA TODAY polled some successful teenage micro business owners for advice. Here’s what they said:

• Expand upon your interests. “Find a task (or) work you like and that is in demand,” says Lucas Rice, 18, who runs a successful landscaping business in Loveland, Ohio. “With my business, I like to be outdoors and to work with my hands, which was one of the reasons I chose landscaping.”

• Price wisely. “Feel around and see what other companies are charging,” then price competitively, Rice says. “When you’re starting out, go a little lower on price in order to start capturing some customers.”

• Make taxes less taxing. Save every work-related receipt. Those expenses could become tax write-offs. IRS.gov has details on dependents, such as children, filing tax returns.

• Don’t overinvest in supplies/equipment. “Allow your business to grow, and then grow your equipment into your business,” says Rice, echoing advice he was given by others. He invested in his first riding mower at age 12 (bought at a yard sale with savings from a newspaper route) and as his customer base grew, he conservatively bought more equipment.

• Promote your business and yourself. “Seek business; do not wait for it to come to you,” says Rice. “I go and welcome new people in the neighborhood and offer my services and give out business cards.” Archer promotes herself and her products on the Web, as well as through fliers she places into shipments to customer

Lucas is one smart kid. I know him personally; he’s one of my business clients!

Teen Entrepreneur Survey

Carol Topp, CPA — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:51:35 +0000

Youth Interested in Entrepreneur Survey

The Kauffman Foundation conducted an online survey of 2,438 youth ages 8 to 21 about entrepreneurship. It shows that four in 10 young people would like to start their own business in the future, while another 37 percent believe starting their own business is a possibility.

Those who want to have their own business say their top reasons are

to use their skills and abilities (92 percent),

build something for their future (89 percent),

be their own boss (87 percent),

see their ideas realized (81 percent)

and earn lots of money (85 percent).

In the United States, 63 percent of respondents in the Harris survey already believe that, if they work hard, they can be entrepreneurs. Twenty-five percent of the youth believe that entrepreneurship is a more desirable career opportunity than other options.

Fact sheet on Youth Entrepreneur Survey

I like their reasons. Starting a micro business and being an entrepreneur is about so much more than just making money-although that’s a nice perk!

But why do only 63% believe they can be entrepreneurs? That’s only a little over half! Is it because of fear, lack of encouragement or lack of understanding what an entrepreneur really does?

And only 25% believe entrepreneurship is a more desireable career choice that others. That’s pretty sad. Maybe these students see only the negative side of too many failed businesses and not the potential of entrepreneurship as a viable career choice.