What advantages does an online business have over bricks and mortar?
September 1, 2006 – 5:51 pmRunning an online business is an extremely rewarding past-time, especially if you’re into technical challenges. If you love staying on top of the newest technologies, and are willing to put in the requisite time and effort, than a business online offers these advantages over one that’s made of bricks and mortar:
1) You have a much lower cost-structure. There’s no doubt a website can be very low-cost to maintain. This is especially true if you have the needed design, programming, SEO, and marketing skills to run it. If you don’t, you can still find the benefits of partnering with others online to be quite beneficial.
2) The potential market is huge online. You can sell to people everywhere in the world. If you have a product or service that doesn’t require physical fulfillment, you can reap extremely high profit sales from anywhere in the globe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you translate your page into multiple languages, you can reach even more of a market. Compare this to being a local restaurant who basically serves the needs of the population within driving distance.
3) You can respond to your customers quicker than ever. You have more data available to consider concerning web traffic than any other business. You can easily track and analyze just what makes you the most money. Customers can easily and freely communicate with you, and the feedback will be invaluable and essentially livetime.
All of these advantages mean you can scale quickly and get rich, as long as you have the right idea online. Even if you don’t have an idea to make you rich, making a living is very possible because the market is just so big. If you’re good at what you do, and translate it to the web, you can’t fail online.



2 Responses to “What advantages does an online business have over bricks and mortar?”
I actually handed in a very detailed paper about an Online vs Brick & Mortar business model in this, the internet generation, we seem to have quite similar thoughts. My main points as yours are, were TCO, Market Size and Speed. I went more in depth with it, mostly because it was a university paper
By TechZ on Sep 2, 2006
Heck yeah. I try and keep my blog posts a bit shorter, but it’s good to see we were on the same page.
By Darren McLaughlin on Sep 4, 2006