<div align="justify">The days may be gone when you could start a business in your garden shed and expand to take over the world, but that doesn't mean that a small or medium-sized company has to quietly potter along in the slow lane. The internet makes it much easier for you to reach a wider audience, whether it's people who want to order your speciality food from around the world, or showcasing your artwork to more viewers than the local gallery. You don't have to be set on becoming the next Amazon to find the internet a useful way of increasing sales. And you don't need to be a technical wizard either. It can be surprisingly easy for a small company to do business online, whatever line of work you're in. Even those working from home can have a go. Compared to just a few years ago, it can be cheaper and easier than you thought to start selling online. And that could mean the difference between doing something as a hobby, or making some money out of it. With costs as low as £20 a month, why not see whether other people want to buy your products, or take a chance and see if your business can sell further afield? There are plenty of choices out there for people who want to dip their toe in the waters of e-commerce without having to lay all their savings or capital on the line. We'll be looking at some of the solutions, and showing you how easily you can set up shop online. The internet has long been described as a way in which everyone can be equal; you can, after all, set up a home page just like everyone else and, when it comes to starting a business, you can set out your stall online too. However, things aren't quite as egalitarian as some people would have you believe. Of course anyone can register their own name, provided it's not already being used by a big American company that decides it'll take yours for good measure. But life's never that simple. How do you set up an online shop that looks good, offers the same facilities as the larger players, and make sure that people can find it easily? And what about payment? Can you manage to take credit cards online easily, or will the economies of scale always swing the balance back towards the big players? Even as recently as a couple of years ago, setting up a shop online could be very fiddly, requiring a lot of technical expertise and - if you wanted to do it well - a lot of money too. Now though, things are cheaper and easier, whether you want to do it yourself or use an off-the-shelf package to create a shop. This doesn't mean that all the obstacles have gone away. You'll still need to persuade people to look at your shop instead of Amazon, for instance, but you'll be able to get up and running much more easily and cheaply. Things have changed dramatically over the past few years. Internet business is now within reach of more people and operations, where previously most would have considered the investment not worth the likely return. Over the next few pages, we'll be looking at some of the different options for putting your business online, showing the different routes you can take depending on your financial and technical resources. We can't promise to find the right solution for your business, but we hope you'll pick up plenty of information to help you make up your mind.

<b>E-shop solutions</b>

For many people, all the 'how it works' questions are irrelevant. Your business is about your product and how you sell it to your customers, not about learning labyrinthine incantations to create a website, program a shopping basket and so on. You just want to click a few buttons, fill in some forms and be done with all the hard work, and there are solutions out there from a variety of suppliers. If you're of a more technical mind, or you simply want the maximum amount of flexibility, then there are plenty of other ways to get your business online by picking individual components - choosing someone to host your site, selecting an e-commerce package, installing and configuring it. It'll take longer but, if you anticipate a lot of business, or want a distinctive look to your site, it's worth considering. And, of course, there's the middle way, providing a compromise between the template-type of shop that you'll find with some off-the-shelf solutions, and the programming and administrative headaches you might run into if you decide to do all the work yourself. Before we look at some of the solutions in practise, let's look at what makes up an e-business so that you can have some idea of how well each of the different options fit the criteria. Obviously, you'll need a website - you can't have an e-shop without one - but what exactly does that entail? First, there's the domain name which will form your web address, like www.hashdot.com .If you haven't registered one for your business, do it soon. And if you have a common name, be prepared for disappointment, since it may already have been taken. A name in common can be almost as bad. Witness the problems of some companies with the word 'Easy' in their name, which are doing battle against the Easyjet/Easyeverything empire. You'll need to design your website, which could be done from scratch or by using a template to fill in blanks relevant to your business, and you'll need somewhere to host it. That somewhere should have good links to the internet, reliable power and, if you're not too technical, people who'll make sure that the web server is kept up-to-date with security software and similar essentials. You need a way to sort out payment too, with e-commerce software of some description on your site. This could be in a separate shopping section, or tightly integrated with the rest of your pages. And you also need a way of making sure that the payment reaches you, via a processing service that passes the information securely to a credit card company, so that it can credit your bank account. To accept credit card details over the net you'll need a secure connection, which is achieved via a 'certificate' installed on the web server. Although these cost much less than in the past, some of the cheaper ones may not work with older browsers. Your e-shop also needs to be a proper part of your business, unless you have the personnel and other resources to run it as a separate unit, and you need to promote it so that people know all about it. In short, there are lots of different things you need to think about, and cost, before you can take the plunge and put your business on the net.

<b>Taking it easy with Cardnet</b>

For many people, the best solution is one that means less time learning new skills and more running your business. Almost since the beginning of e-commerce, there have been packages designed to help you get a shop set up and, as you'd expect, many of them have now reached a level of maturity which makes them a lot simpler to use than before. Actinic is a complete, self-contained shopping system that can be added to an existing site provided this is already set up. The latest version is now available as a complete package via the Lloyds TSB Cardnet brand (www.lloydstsbcardnet.com), which includes the software, a domain name and web hosting to take care of the technical side. On the financial side, it includes registration with Lloyds merchant services, allowing you to accept credit cards, and there are no fees for the first 100 transactions processed each month; excess transactions are priced at 40p each. In short, it's a package with just about everything you need to set up an online shop for £350 up front and an ongoing £99 a month (ex VAT). The Actinic software is straightforward to use and, if taking credit cards online is important to you, a solution like this at least offers the benefits of (broadly) fixed costs. Of course, if you intend to sell lots of small items, you might find that a commission rate of 40p eats too much into your margin, or you may want to cut the monthly outgoings, especially when you're first venturing into e-commerce. Actinic's Catalog consists of the shopping application, which runs on the web server, and a management tool that you run on your own computer. You use this to create product catalogues, choose templates for your website and then upload the whole lot to the web server, giving you a near-instant online shop. You can also use the software to retrieve the list of orders from the website where they're securely encrypted for safety. Even if you don't use the packaged Cardnet solution, Catalog is well worth a look, and can be used in conjunction with most hosting solutions. One feature that may be particularly helpful for the less tech-savvy user is the encryption. While you usually need to pay for a secure certificate for your website to ensure that credit card details and so forth are safe as they pass over the net, Catalog pages can use a Java applet of their own design. This does much the same thing but without the potentially fiddly installation of a certificate on your web server, or the cost of the certificate which can vary from around £50 to £300 a year.

<b>1&1</b>

As a sort of half-way-house between the Lloyds TSB Cardnet solution and more DIY alternatives, 1&1's Professional Eshop provides everything you'll need to get online - hosting, shop software and technical support - all for £19.99 a month. Worldpay's Clickandbuild system offers a similar solution. The only important thing that's not included with Professional Eshop is live online credit card processing, although this can be added if you have a merchant account at a flat rate of 5p per transaction. This is in addition to the commission charges from the card company. If you want to do live processing with Eshop then you'll need to budget a little extra for it. That's not to say that you can't accept credit cards using the system as it stands. When you set up the shop there's a credit card option in the payment configuration screen. It allows you to receive card information that's been entered over the net and process it manually, like any other Card Holder Not Present transaction. There are various different versions of Eshop; the one we looked at includes up to 600 products, customisable shop templates and a mailing list for sending out newsletters. But you can opt for a version with more customisation too, if you prefer. Unlike Actinic Catalog, all the configuration and set-up of Eshop is done via a web browser. There's always the potential for this seeming a little clunky, but 1&1 has created a fairly simple interface, with tabbed sections for shop design, products, payment, orders, customers and so on. Within each section, clicking to add something new, like a product category, starts a web-based wizard with just a few straightforward options on each screen. You can also change a lot more options, including much of the text that's displayed at different areas within the shop. And best of all, you can add attributes to products, or PHP code fragments to help fine-tune the behaviour of the shop. Those with a more technical mind can opt for the Developer Eshop version, giving more control, and there are even plug-ins for Netobjects Fusion to help add shop components to a design of your own. For most people though, this sort of fine control won't be necessary; you can create an online shop ready to accept orders with payment via cheque or cash in two different currencies with relatively little work. You can create a store without doing much customisation at all. There's a wealth of options controlling things like email receipts or order notifications, so you can ensure that each time an order is placed, it's sent directly to the person who wants to fulfil it. Then, of course, you need to add descriptive text, thumbnails and detail images for all your products. If you already have a product catalogue on computer, whether in a database or spreadsheet, you're unlikely to want to type all the information into a web page again, no matter how simple the interface. If you have 10 products it might be tolerable, but not if you have 200. Fortunately, just as with other online shop building systems such as Clickandbuild, there's the option to upload a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file with details of all your products, which can save a lot of time. And just as we found when we looked at Clickandbuild, if you happen to be using a Mac, you'll need to remember to save the CSV file then convert it to Dos text before you can upload it, which adds an extra step. Nevertheless, 1&1's Professional Eshop is extremely good value and, if you already have a merchant account, the online payment processing via Protx is worth checking out. If this type of solution appeals to you, take a look at Worldpay's Clickandbuild, although we found it to be a little fiddlier than 1&1 for setting up shop.

<b>Striking out on your own</b>

While systems like Eshop and Clickandbuild take a lot of the headaches away from setting up a shop, there may be equally sound reasons for doing things differently. What if, for instance, you're already paying for high-quality web hosting for your main site, and you simply want to add online shopping? If your budget is tight, or you simply want to maintain a seamless feel, you might not want to host the shop elsewhere. If you have spare capacity on a web server, and it won't cost you more to put the shop pages there, then it's a sensible move. But remember: if people are redirected elsewhere when they want to buy, they may get a little nervous. Although you can add information about your company to a 1&1 Eshop, you might want rather more than that. For example, you may have a database of common questions and answers you'd like to put online, easing the load on people who answer the phone, or you might want lots of extra facilities like customer surveys and discussion forums. All of these things are easy enough to do, but they don't fit within the frameworks offered by web-based shop building systems, so you'll have to look at other solutions and take a more DIY approach. Before you get too put off by the DIY approach, bear in mind that it doesn't mean you have to do everything from scratch. There are plenty of ways you can integrate a shop into a site that you've designed yourself. With Netobjects Fusion web design, for example, you can easily insert components for the 1&1 Eshop system and others. The same is true of Macromedia's Dreamweaver, which has plug-ins available for a range of commerce systems. It makes enabling your site as simple as creating a product page and choosing to add a Buy button, then specifying the price and other parameters in the web design tool. You can also use a product like Actinic Catalog to add a shopping section to your site, or go for a much more hands-on approach, using something like OScommerce, an open source shopping system written in the PHP scripting language. It needs more technical know-how to get it up and running, but it does offer lots of customisation possibilities. While nowhere near as easy as using a ready-built system like 1&1, it's not beyond the skills of most competent web designers. If you do opt for a solution like this, you'll also need to do all the other bits, like sorting out payment. But going down this route means that you're most likely to find things tricky when using a system that you're putting together yourself. You'll need to choose a payment processor that links with the package you're using, and satisfies the security criteria of the card companies. Fortunately, many of the processors provide details of how you need to submit information to them but, once again, you'll need to be prepared for more fiddling about than with an off-the-shelf package.
<b>Finishing touches<b>
Whether you go for a completely off-the-shelf solution, something with a modest degree of customisation or a complete self-made site and design extravaganza, there are lots of things to bear in mind before going online with your shop - and some of them can be time consuming. For example, for just about every shop, we'd recommend that you have pictures of the products you're going to sell. There are a few instances where it's not necessary, but for most people it's essential. And you're probably going to need two images for each product: a small thumbnail, and a larger one which shows more detail. If you're selling things like clothes or furniture you might need shots from more than one angle so that people can really see what they'll be getting. One solution is to invest in a digital camera. You should be able to buy one that's capable of producing decent shots for a website for under £200. If money is tight though, or you just want to experiment to see how things work out, shops like Boots or Jessops are able to develop ordinary films and put the images on a CD for a small fee. At the time of writing, Boots charged less than £2 extra per film. That can be a very cost-effective way of getting the images you need, and much quicker than scanning them all from existing prints. Remember that you'll most likely need to tweak them in an image editor so that they're compact and won't make your site load too slowly. Of course, selling products on your website is only the start. You have to make sure that, when someone places an order, they get what they ordered quickly and easily. While people may be prepared to wait a couple of weeks for orders made by telephone or post, they'll expect much more prompt service via the web. It's therefore important to consider how you'll ship things out, and how you'll handle the orders received via your website. Some systems require you to sign in and download the details of orders from websites, while others can be configured to send each new order via email to a nominated address. The right solution will obviously depend on your business, but you need to make sure it works. Does the person who processes orders at the moment feel comfortable about using email, for example? Can you make sure that emails with orders are automatically downloaded each day and added to the list of things that have to be done? Will it work OK if you're on holiday and someone else is looking after the office work? Don't forget legal issues too, like Data Protection registration. You can find a good summary of other points to consider on the Actinic website here. You also need to worry about delivery. While all the systems we've looked at can help out, storing information like the weight of a product or the shipping cost needs to be factored in. You'll need to ensure that you hunt around and find the appropriate way of delivering things, and decide who's going to pay. Can you subsidise deliveries to appear more competitive online, or will you have to pass on the whole cost? And think about whether there are certain combinations of payment and delivery that you can't accept; 1&1's Eshop is good at this. You can, for instance, allow cheques only for collections, so that the option to pay by cheque won't appear unless someone has chosen to collect their goods in this way. However, much of this really boils down to one thing: thinking carefully about what your business does, and how you want to do it online. While systems like Eshop, Actinic Catalog and Clickandbuild can make setting up the shop fairly easy, they can't help you with the business planning. Only you can do that, but we hope that we've given you plenty of information about what you need to consider and how much it will cost.
<b>Getting your money</b>
The hardest part of running an online business is the money. How do you make sure it reaches you when the customer could be half-way across the country or the world? Much depends on the type of business you run. If you deal with other companies, then simply invoicing them in the way you normally do is the obvious solution. It doesn't involve any more work, and fits in with your existing systems. But when you're dealing with consumers, you'll usually need some way of accepting immediate payment. After all, asking people to post a cheque and waiting for it to clear takes the edge off the 'instant' online ordering. Essentially, you have two choices: credit cards or internet payment systems. The latter, such as Paypal and Nochex, both allow ways of sending money to one of your accounts, without the need to be a 'merchant' - the special contract you need for credit card processing. But they will seem to many visitors to be a little lacking in professionalism. That may be fine if you're just starting out or selling homemade crafts, but for an established company it will look odd. If you want to take credit cards, you need to sign up for a merchant account with one of the Acquiring Banks - like Barclaycard Merchant Services or HSBC - that handles the card processing. You'll have to pay set-up costs and commission on each transaction. You can process cards manually, entering the details after you've downloaded them from a website, or opt for real-time processing. If you choose real-time processing you'll also need to use a payment service, a company with approved computer systems that links to the card processor. They may charge commission too - from 5p to five per cent. In short, credit cards make it much easier for people to use your site, but the costs involved in accepting them aren't trivial, and you will need to sell a fair bit to recoup the basic charges involved in processing them.
<b>Design tips</b>
A well-designed site is essential if you don't want to put visitors off, but what constitutes good design? You'll find almost as many answers as you will jobbing web designers, but here are some of our top tips. Keep it simple: you don't need to overload your site with Flash animation, Java script or pages that need special plug-ins to view. If someone has to download something, or change their browser options, they're very likely to go and look elsewhere. Be careful with your use of frames, too, as they can make navigation with the Back button hard. Ensure that it's always clear to people where in the site they are: what section, what product they're looking at and how they add or remove items from shopping baskets or finalise their purchase. Getting lost in a department store is annoying and the same is true for online shops. Remember too that while people need to be able to see pictures of what they're buying, they won't want to spend ages downloading huge images. By all means have high-resolution pictures if they'll help - if you're selling art, for example - but provide thumbnails by default, and always remember that, while you might have fast internet access, such as ADSL, many of your visitors won't.
<b>TEN TIPS FOR ONLINE SUCCESS</b>

1.Keep on top of things Make sure that you process web orders efficiently, or your reputation will suffer.
2.Shop around The cheapest deals for e-shop hosting may not provide all the technical help a novice will need.
3.Update your site regularly Even just new pictures of existing products will help stave off the 'forgotten' look and, with a template-based site, it can be easy to apply a new style if you don't have other changes.
4.Don't over-design your site Remember that the point is to sell products, not show off your Dreamweaver skills.
5.Budget before you start Don't forget that you may have to pay for secure certificates, product images and software, as well as the cost of hosting a shop.
6.Keep backups You may not be able to afford redundant web servers, but a back-up will get you running again if the worst happens.
7.Plan ahead Remember that, as well as hosting costs, you'll have to pay commission on credit card transactions, so watch your margins if you want to make a profit.
8.Keep customers informed Use email to remind customers about your site, but always ensure that you have their permission first. Unsolicited mail will lose you customers.
9.Integrate Try to make sure that the website of your business works properly with the rest of it, otherwise you could experience problems.
Promote your site Make sure that the address is on all your printed literature and in any adverts.
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