After setting up your Cart - What to do next?

[jaymhn]

Hi All

 

Once you have successfully setup the online store, the next question is what? You will be saying, "start online marketing, of course". Well, I have been into this field for the last 6 years and to be frank with you, that is not the right way. Online store is a place where people will have to come and be convinced to do business there. They need to browse through your store contents, then click on that "Checkout" button and enter their credit card details to make the payment. This sounds simple to read, but in the real world, it is lot tougher to make the customer, eventhough he/she likes your product, to extend his hand to take out his wallet and then his credit card. Once that is done, it is much more difficult for that person to enter those credit card details there.

 

Have you thought well about this. I hope you have. However, I suggest, whatever you do after setting up your cart, the key priority should be given to make the store trustworthy. Any customer who comes in should feel that you are a genuine store keeper who would be providing the service you have advertised and placed on your store front in return for the payment. Always have this thought in mind that the customer is never seeing you, or your place of business or your inventory. This is an online store front and it means that there is no physical entity to been seen for the customer to make themselves comfortable that the product is there available with you. The constant worry, "what if you will run-away with my money after I pay without delivering the goods to me", has to be removed.

 

The best way possibily to do it is incorporate your online store as a genuine business and the best possible location to register your business is The United States. Register it as a limited liability company in The State of Delaware by using any online incorporation firm (My recommendations for this service is listed in the footer section). Some of the incorporation services guarantees a 2 day turnaround time even. The charges for doing this would be so marginal compared to the legtimacy your online store front has in return. There are hundreds of advantages of incorporating your online business, but the main one is that now your customers know that you are a legtimate company in the United States and they will be more than willing to do business with you. From my experience, the customer trust level goes up so high that a site, which was making a turnover of 210 USD/month before incorporation was continously making 2400 USD/month on an average after incorporation. The fact is that I was advertising that this is a legtimate company on the home page, terms page, agreement page and whereever I could. Without any change in the efforts of marketing, the turnover jumped over 10 times.

 

Another step I learned from my experience is fully utilizing the tax benifits, plus the transaction benifits in doing a business as a U.S entity. State of Delaware has a rule that limited liability companies registered in Delaware has to pay a flat annual tax of 200 USD for whatever income they generate provided they are not selling or buying anything from U.S. Online Businesses are considered as a part of it and hence the tax component of this income is so small. However, to make this process legal, you will have to apply for a Federal Employer Tax Identification Number, called EIN in short, which is like a social security number for a company. This also can be done online using an EIN Nomination Service provider (My recommendations for this service is listed in the footer section). The EIN number will be allocated instantly.

 

The advantage of having an EIN number is that now your company is legally eligible to open a bank account. However, post Sep 11 scenario and the Patriot Act has now made it almost impossible to do this online by yourself. If you can be in the United States and present yourself in front of the banker with a valid passport almost all bankers will be able to open a bank account for your company. However, if you are not able to do so, don't despair. There is a legal way to accomplish this now as explained below.

 

If you can have a U.S Citizen or Permenant Resident as 100% non-voting member in your limited liability company, they will be able to open the bank account for you. The legalities involved for this way is out of scope of this introduction. If you need further information on this, you can contact me. Using an operating agreement, your partner will be able to operate the bank account for you. I know that it is very difficult to find a decent parter for your business. However, there are few companies who provide this bank account opening service whom you can contact. I have used one of them and it works. Moreover, these guys are professional and could be trusted (My recommendations for this service is listed in the footer section). Having a U.S bank account entitles you with a great option of operation. You can fully operate most of the U.S Bank Accounts online. Using the secure username and passwords you can login to the bank's site, access your account check balance, request for check books, do wire transfers (even international), thus providing complete flexibility.

 

Once you have fully operational bank account, you can connect your paypal account with it. You can register for a merchant account that will internally connect to your U.S bank account. You can connect the paypal accounts as well as your merchant accounts to your store now. The end result, your customers will be seeing a complete transaction between a company registered in U.S and them. The money is transferred in the company's name. Completly trustrwothy.

 

Best Regards

Jay Mohan

 

Note:

For company incorporation, EIN Nominee Service and Bank account opening service I totally depend on EasyCorp Limited (www.easycorpltd.com). They have offices in U.S as well as U.K. I have registered two of my companies with them in this fashion and both the experience were complete. I personally recommend this company because of my good experience.

 

Another company that claims to provide all the above services is Thetaworld Corporation (www.offshore-services.biz). However, I have no direct experience with them and hence do not recommend. They have their offices in Panama and Florida.