Selling Online Verses A Storefront

  Over the last few years online shopping has increased a lot. While that is great for some businesses, others work best as storefronts. Some can find the balance and do both. 

  For an online business, startup costs can be very small depending on the type of business. You don’t have to pay for anything a storefront would have. You could have your inventory at your house and ship as needed. Since you would be selling online, you would have to have competitive prices to make people want to buy from you. So most of the time your prices will be less than storefronts and people who don’t have to have the product in-hand to buy would most likely buy it online.  One big drawback of selling online is shipping costs. Sometimes shipping costs would make the item just as much if not more than what people can buy it for at a storefront. It also makes it hard to sell when bigger companies offer free shipping along with competitive prices because when you are just starting out you may not be able to offer as great of deals. In situations like that you have to be very good at marketing and advertising.

  For a storefront, to open you would have to pay rent on a storefront, buy displays for products, buy inventory to fill the store, and hire employees if needed. A few reasons where a storefront would be best would be for products that would cost too much to ship or if people want to see the quality of the product before they buy. If there isn’t much competition on those products in your area you may can charge more for a certain item, in turn making more profit on the item than you would have by selling it online.

  For me, I have an online tack business. I chose to start online because I couldn’t afford the startup costs that a storefront would have had. I have been able to offer competitive prices and free shipping on most of my products. Most of my products are priced lower than larger stores, which helps in sales while I am growing the business. Eventually I would like to open a storefront because in my area there aren’t any good tack stores. Most people that need a quality product either have to order online or have to drive an hour or two away to find it.