know your business niche, give good service – ebusiness tips

Know your business niche and give good service are two tips from Melissa Norfolk, the author of the Australian and New Zealand edition of Starting an Online Business for Dummies.

More tips from Melissa and information about her book are here.

10 tips to consider for your e-commerce cart

Ten tips for a customer-friendly shopping cart here (courtesy of UK web firm Polr), including: don’t have any nasty surprises, get straight to the product, let them know your product.

open source e-commerce tools – free and online

Looking for an e-commerce solution to help you sell your stuff online? Here’s a web page that highlights 16 open source e-commerce tools — including a popular New Zealand-developed e-commerce tool for WordPress blogs.

how to make your online and offline business gel

Barkers Men’s Clothing’s two-year-old e-commerce website has boosted business and also nicely complemented the business of its 26 ‘bricks and mortars’ stores. It’s a good little case study:  Get the full story here.

Highlights

• They try to ensure the homepage mirrors the look of the shops.
• They research similar online businesses to find good online business models.
• Google Analytics plays an important role in monitoring the site’s effectiveness.

how to make money from online communities

A bunch of Kiwis have set up a growing online community (based to start with in England) around cycling for charity and have pulled some impressive sponsors on board who recognise the value of the community.

To build a self-supporting community, they recommend:

• Understanding the profile you’re helping your community members build – make it something they’re proud of.
• That every action in your community, is an opportunity to promote, add life and currency to your community.
• Knowing the goals of your community and the numbers or metrics that define your community’s success.

four web businesses amongst top Kiwi start-ups

To see what is hot in the e-business space right now, check out four of New Zealand’s top start-up companies for 2008 — four web businesses praised for their strong ideas and great execution.

Here’s an article explaining them, and below are links to their websites:

Bookhabit – an online book store with an innovative business model for self-publishers
Endemic world – an online design store for N ew Zealand products
Unimarket – an online (SaaS) multi-tenant eProcurement solution
Celsias – a website that helps people and organisations do practical things to combat climate change.

e-business kit for tourist operators

From the Aussies, but full of good all-round information, here’s an e-business kit for tourist operators with everything from the basics of setting up a website; search engine optimisation; an initial assessment of your current online marketing status; how to attract people through online marketing; understanding online customer reviews; online booking systems; plus  much more.

Tons of information; much of it good for all types of e-businesses, in fact.

want to get into digital publishing?

Digital publishing – what is it about and how to get into it? Seminars in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch next month will explain all.

The Digital Publishing Forum will provide insight into what is happening internationally and in New Zealand, and guest speakers from the industry will explain what they do and how they do it.

The seminar is spookily well-timed! The newly launched e-book reader Kindle 2 (from Amazon) is getting heaps of positive press and looks set to be a huge seller, even more so than the Kindle 1. It could do for e-book sales what the iPod did for sales of online music.

E-books currently make up less than 1 percent of the total book market, so there’s tons of opportunity to get on board early in this sector and develop an innovative business model.

One company that has done this is New Zealand’s BookHabit, an online book store where writers can upload their own books to sell, and readers can download the first chapter for free.

twitter – how to use it in business

Continuing with our Twitter theme, here’s a great piece from “internet psychologist” Graham Jones on how to use Twitter positively as a business tool, including for:

• Staff in/out status
• News headlines
• Emergency information
• New staff appointments
• Event listings
• Price list announcements
• Stock availability
• Share price index
• Public relations

web-working for businesses

An informative story here on how two businesses are using the web and online tools for internal communications, project and product management, HR and marketing.