As business owners, our main goal is to sell our products to our customers. We have great products and we should be making it as easy as possible for our potential customers to buy from us.

An online store allows people to browse and buy your products wherever they are. An online store is not meant to replace foot traffic into stores, but it is another branch of any business's sales strategy. An online store means you are not limited to just customers in your local area who can come into your store. If a customer can browse your products and purchase online, you have a much better chance of making that sale.

And it's so easy to set up and integrate with your existing web site. Just a few extra pages on your site can allow customers to search and browse your products and see the extent of your product lines. You can upsell and cross-sell products based on customer selections and return customers can buy the same products again the future quickly and easily.

An online store doesn't mean you have to worry about shipping and delivery. You can set up the online store so that customers can buy the product online using the credit card or PayPal account and then come in-store to pick up the goods. And you can communicate with the customer throughout that whole process through the status of the order. You can set up automated emails that are sent to the customer so they know exactly what is going on. If you do ship products, customers can be sent an email to indicate that the product has been passed on to the freight company. Or if you want the customer to pick up in-store, you change the status of the order and an email is sent to them with the pick up address and any instructions they will need to follow in order to expedite the pick up process.

And the cost of an online store can be so much less than costs related to physical stores. The quickest way to get up and running is to create a PayPal merchant account. All you need to do is create an account and link a bank account to the account. PayPal will validate your account and then it can be linked to your web site where you can immediately start taking orders. And PayPal offers protection to both the customer and the merchant against fraudulent transactions too. You can even do returns and refunds.

The sky is the limit. If you want to get started with an online store, just get in contact and we can discuss your options.