If you have a successful brick-and-mortar business and are looking to broaden your customer base, you may have considered adding an internet shopping store. An online presence will not only help you reach new customers, it can also help you serve existing customers in a convenient, time-saving way. Your customers will thank you for giving them a choice between picking something up in-person and clicking in their order from home or work.

If you don’t already have a brick-and-mortar business, an online venture has many advantages over a traditional business.

• Your sales apparatus--your website--can double as a marketing tool.
• Overhead can be much less since you will not need to rent or purchase physical space for your store.
• The internet allows you to reach a much larger customer base than you would be able to with a brick-and-mortar shop.
• Catalog-type sales are much more cost-efficient because you can eliminate expensive printing and catalog shipping.
• Online shopping carts capture all your transaction and customer information electronically so it is easy to analyze and reuse.
• The web makes it easier to access your customer if you sell to a niche audience or specialized market.
• When you decide to start online business operations, visibility, convenience, ease of use, and security should all be considered carefully.

Whatever your business and regardless of whether or not you have already established a successful retail store offline, you will want to construct an online sales strategy. When you start an online business, it is crucial to have a plan for how you will reach your customers, how you will keep your customers coming back to your website, and most important, how you will convert website visits into sales.

A website's visibility to search engines such as Google and Yahoo can make the difference between a sales boom and a venture's bust. Good shopping cart software is designed to be spider friendly, so it can easily be crawled and indexed by the major search engines, which means you will get more hits. Once your customers reach your internet shopping store, you will need to make sure it is well-designed so they can find the items they want by intuitive browsing or by searching. Network Solutions e-commerce software allows you to place items in categories and subcategories and to mark products for browsing by price, manufacturer, and category. The software is also equipped with a robust search engine that will search product names and descriptions. It can also be set to search added keywords, which can be hidden from the customer.

If you will be accepting credit cards online and do not have any other method for completing the transaction (such as a physical terminal), then you will need a Merchant Account and an online Payment Gateway.

Other issues to consider are the legal requirements of an online business. These may be different depending on whether you are selling physical items or products that can be downloaded from your Web site, such as software. Issues of return and refund must be addressed. What are the delivery and return mechanisms (e.g., download, FTP, e-mail)? Are they secure?

The issues you should think about regarding physical products include "jurisdictional entanglements", if there are limited geographic areas in which customers are legally able to purchase your product. For example, certain plants cannot be shipped to some states in the USA.

The terms of an online sale should mirror those of a traditional sale. Ensure that online terms are consistent with on-the-package product warranty and liability information.

Lastly, you will need to ensure that all of your terms of sale and personal data collection policies are clearly worded and conspicuously posted on your site. A Privacy Policy is also essential because you will be storing customer data. If you're not sure where to begin, visit the online arm of the Better Business Bureau or the non-profit group TRUSTe.