In a previous post I talked a little bit about the ins and outs of getting an e-commerce website off the ground with Shopify. That post focused solely on developing the content and functionality of the site. In this post I’ll talk about some of the more superficial elements involved in starting an online business.
Domain Names
I honestly don’t have much to say about domain names other than to state the obvious: you need to have one. As for what the domain name should be, I have only two criteria: it needs to be simple and it needs to have a ‘.com’ extension. Keep it simple so that people will remember it. Make it have a ‘.com’ extension because every reputable e-commerce site has a .com domain name. As for choosing a registrar, there are tons of choices. If you’re particularly price-sensitive I would encourage you to shop around a bit. I’ve used a few different registrars for various web projects over the past few years and in my experience they’re all pretty much the same. Quite frankly I hate dealing with them and view them as a necessary evil of doing business online.Once you’ve registered a domain name getting it pointed at your online store is generally a pretty trivial matter. If you’re using Shopify they have loads of great documentation on how to accomplish this.
I don’t know about you, but when I see an online business that uses a free e-mail service (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) to allow its customers to contact them it’s a bit of a turn off. It’s a given that an online business (particularly a small online business with no appreciable budget) will rely heavily on e-mail to communicate with its customers. I think a lot of smaller online businesses end up leveraging free e-mail services because they’re free and very easy to setup. In reality, it’s not that difficult or expensive to setup ‘@yourdomainname.com’ e-mail addresses. Many domain name registrars offer this service for a pretty reasonable price. That’s not a bad way to go, but with just a bit of effort you can get professional looking e-mail addresses for your business without paying anything extra.
I’ve used Google’s free e-mail service, GMail, for my personal e-mail address for years. They offer tons of storage and have a best-in-class web interface for dealing with your mail. If you don’t already have a free ‘@gmail.com’ e-mail address for your personal e-mail do yourself a favor and go get one now. It’s completely free and truly an awesome service. In addition to free ‘@gmail.com’ accounts, Google now offers the ability to have a full fledged GMail account for your own private domain with a service they call Google Apps. They really push the ‘Premier Edition’ of this service with is geared at large business and organizations. The premier edition costs money, but thankfully for bootstrappers like me they also offer a free Standard Edition. The Standard Edition is billed as being geared toward organizations and communities, but there’s nothing in the Terms Of Service stating that you can’t use it for a business. Getting Google Apps to work with your own domain name does take a bit of work, but Google offers pretty good documentation with step by step instructions for getting it setup with many of the popular domain name registrars.
Once you’ve got it all setup, you’ll be able to create as many e-mail addresses for your custom domain name as you want. Right now I have ‘support@pixeyewear.com’ and ‘jesse@pixeyewear.com’ in addition to a few other accounts for the folks that help me out with the business from time to time. All in all, I’m responsible for three ‘@pixeyewear.com’ e-mail addresses in addition to my personal ‘@gmail.com’ e-mail address. This might sound like a hassle, but with a few tricks it’s actually pretty manageable. First of all, I setup all of my business e-mail accounts to automatically forward to my personal GMail. I’ve also setup a filter on my personal GMail to apply a label to any message that arrives addressed to one my business e-mail addresses. This lets me quickly and easily identity these messages in my inbox. Finally, I utilize Gmail's ability to let you send e-mail from multiple addresses within the same account to let me tag any outgoing message I send as having come from the appropriate business e-mail address. In this way, I only ever have to login to my personal GMail and can manage all of my business e-mail directly from that single account.
Telephone
Personally, I hate making and receiving telephone calls 99% of the time. I’m a firm believer that there’s a proper communication medium for every situation and in my opinion the telephone is not always the right one. Don’t get me wrong, I talk on the phone every day, but typically only because an indirect and/or non-verbal communication medium wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand. That said, the vast majority of communication that needs to take place between a small online business and its customers can take place via e-mail.
I do think, however, that having a publicly visible phone number on your e-commerce website lends your business some credibility instills a bit more confidence in your customers. I only have a single phone number (my cell phone) and certainly didn’t want to post that number on my website. Fortunately for me there is a free service from Google for accepting calls online called Google Voice.
You can setup a Google Voice account off any standard Google Account. Google recently started rolling out a number of new features, including Google Voice, for accounts that are associated with Google Apps, so if you took my advice above about using Google Apps for your store e-mail you can create a Google Voice account specifically for your business. When you create the account you get to choose a phone number. Google currently offers a huge number of phone numbers in a wide array of area codes. I opted to choose my local area code as I make it point to call out the fact that I run a “local business” whenever I advertise to people in my area.
After choosing a phone number you’ll be prompted to forward that number to another “real” phone number. I have my Google Voice number forwarded to my cell phone. This may sound like it defeats the purpose of having the Google Voice number, but Google Voice offers some great additional features. First of all, call screening is built in. That means that if someone calls your Google Voice number it will ring your phone. If you answer, Google Voice will announce who is calling and give you the option to send the caller to voice mail. If the caller opts to leave you a voice mail you’ll get an instant e-mail notification informing you. Also, if you’re not available to answer your “real” phone the Google Voice mail kicks in automatically. All in all I’d say that getting this all setup takes about an hour or so. That’s one hour of your time to have a real local phone number that you can publish on your business website for no cost. That’s not a bad deal at all.
Wrap Up
As I’ve said before, when you’re starting a business with little cash you have to fake it ‘til you make it sometimes. Of all the things that I’ve laid out above, the only one that costs any “real” money is the domain name. With a good domain name and a few hours to invest in setting up and learning a bit about Google Apps you can create a very professional online presence even if you’re a single person running a business out of your apartment.
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