You want to start an e-commerce business but you don’t have much money available. So naturally, you want to make the most of what you have, trying to get the best possible value for every dollar you spend on building your startup. There are a couple of things you can do to reduce your e-commerce startup costs and get your business up and running faster. Discover them below.
- Use an online accounting system
For a reasonable monthly fee, an online accounting solution like QuickBooks brings you powerful accounting features that help you manage your business finances on your own, so that you don’t have to call in a costly accountant to do the same math that an app can do automatically. While you will still need an accountant, you won’t have to hire him or her full-time.
- Invest in an inventory control app
A good inventory control app helps you effectively manage your inventory to reduce the cost of overstock or understock. At the same time, it helps you order the right products at the right time, ensuring a healthy stock inflow that allows you to fulfill customer orders.
- Use cloud-based tools and apps
Google Apps for Work, which includes email, cloud storage, and collaboration tools, as well as apps and services such as Dropbox, Office 365, Evernote, and Skype can help you reduce and even eliminate hardware costs. Instead of buying office hardware and equipment, you can ask your employees to use these services on their personal computers.
- Allow your employees to work from home
Do you really need an office to run your e-Commerce business? Your marketing and sales, customer support, inventory, and IT teams can all work effectively from home. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, the world’s leading blogging platform, doesn’t have an office; its employees work from home. If a big company like Automattic can pull it off, so can you.
- Cut web design costs by customizing an existing theme
Instead of building a website from scratch, have a professional web designer customize for you a free WordPress theme, and use it as the foundation for your website and blog. Later on, as your business grows, you can invest in a redesign.
- Outsource as much work as you can
Instead of hiring a full time web designer, marketer, developer, or content writer, use websites such as Freelacer.com and UpWork.com to outsource these jobs as you need them.
- Use a business intelligence and sales forecasting tool
Instead of hiring a sales analyst, you can use an inventory management app such as DataQlick, which comes with powerful yet easy to understand business intelligence and sales forecasting tools.
As you can see, there are plenty of things you can do to cut your e-Commerce startup costs, from using cloud-based technology and an inventory management app, to outsourcing work and encouraging your employees to work from home.
