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Here's a plan for bringing your small business into the world of e-commerce in the 21st Century.

Phase One: Map Out A Long-Term Strategy

Many small business owners have jumped onto the Internet with both feet, and found that it won't quite support the weight of their investment of time and energy. But many others are happily generating a significant stream of revenue, and profits. Which one would you rather emulate? The key to success in e-commerce right now is to consider it as carefully as you would any other marketing strategy or sales channel. To begin, you should consider the four fundamentals of successful e-commerce:

1) The precise audience you're hoping to reach with your e-commerce efforts. Originally, the Internet was the domain of predominantly male nerds and techno-dweebs. But today, the Internet and particularly the World Wide Web is increasingly occupied by ordinary women - moms, wives, sisters and daughters just like we encounter everywhere else in the world. Unafraid of technology that's sensible and easy to use, these women are actively using the entire Internet as a directory for finding a wide range of products and services they want to purchase. Their presence, and their active shopping, makes the web increasingly attractive to a broad range of commercial interests.

2) The clear-cut goals you are trying to accomplish with your e-commerce efforts. You may have an idea for a new product or service that you'd like to let fly in the marketplace without a big investment. You may have a retail store that you know would attract a wider clientele, if only it were available electronically. You may offer a complex or expensive product or service that normally requires a long sales cycle, and feel you would benefit from a confirming, confidence-building, and informative Web site your prospects could explore at their own convenience. These are only a few of the solid reasons to develop a presence on the Web. It's important to be able to state your reasons for engaging in e-commerce, because without a clear goal and agenda you can easily find yourself caught up in technology for its own sake and develop an "awesome" Web site that fails to meet any serious business objectives.

3) The role you want your Internet presence to play in relation to your other, existing sales and marketing programs. E-commerce does not operate very well in a vacuum. There are few people who send money to e-merchants simply on the strength of their Web site text and graphics. More often, consumers use Web sites as an adjunct to what they already know about a product or service, and what they can discover from non-Internet directories, advertising, reputation, word-of-mouth, mailings, and so forth. That's why the most successful Web merchants weave their online presence into an overall marketing strategy, with consistent and overlapping graphics, messages, and product/service offerings.

4) The level of online action you're anticipating. Even if you can produce only crude estimates of the online activity volume your Web site will generate initially, don't ignore this fundamental consideration. That's because there are important technical issues underlying your Web site's every function that translate directly into cost factors. And these cost factors escalate quite significantly as your online transaction volume increases and you need, for example, a more powerful computer hosting your Web site and a more capacious connection to the Internet. If you provide too little power and capacity, people who browse your Web site will find it slow and unresponsive, and may even be turned away at times by an electronic traffic jam. Too much, and you'll pay considerably more than necessary, eating into profits and absorbing cash you could better spend on other parts of your marketing effort.

For example, at the low end you can pay as little as $25 per month for a "personal" Web site, with enough storage capacity and communications power to support a modest site enjoying a relative trickle of traffic. You can register a domain name for another $70. Then in your spare time you can bang together some simple Web-page files and post them to your hosting computer. Presto, you've got an online presence. It may not win awards for outstanding design. But it will work.

You can write these files with any text editor, or use basic Web authoring software like Adobe's Pagemill (about $100) to build a little more interesting web site, a little easier. If you want to build a better Web site, you'll probably want to own Web authoring software specifically designed to support e-commerce. At the $1000 price point, you can buy one of many packages that let you build a more sophisticated commercial Web site offering shopping carts and online credit card transactions. For $3000 and up, you can buy the tools to build and maintain a relatively complex Web site that, for example, lets your customers track what they've bought and trace their orders through your processing and delivery sequence. As you spend more for the Web site building tools, you gain the power to include stronger accounting tools and more elaborate features, such as online catalogs and better security for your customers.

If you don't have people working for you to author your Web site, you can pay outside contractors upwards of $1,000 or $10,000 to develop a very sophisticated Web site with secure purchasing capabilities that ties into your company's automated data systems for inventory, shipping, accounting, and more. To maintain this site, you'll pay anything from $100 to $500 per month, and even higher rates if and when traffic levels built up past several thousand hits per week.

Another approach is to "rent" an "online retail space" from an existing "Web mall". These "master Web sites" effectively surround and support your own Web site. It exists within their overall domain name, secured with their firewalls and passwords, and storing your Web site files on their server. The best of these Web malls also do their own marketing and promotion, bringing a steady flow of traffic to the general location and giving shoppers a better chance to find your particular location as they browse.

If you go this route, you won't need your own Web-authoring software. The Web malls let you connect to the Internet with any communicating computer and use the mall's own Web-creation software to build and maintain the files that make up your Web site. But be aware that you might quickly outgrow the Web mall as your volume of online transactions increases. If this happens, you'll be forced to move your "store" to a new URL, which means you'll need to go through the difficult and time-consuming process of making sure all your promotional efforts are revised so they point to your new location, and all your established customers know of the changeover.

Robert Moskowitz is a business consultant based in Woodland Hills, CA, who writes frequently on productivity, office automation and technology. He is President of the American Telecommuting Association, a membership organization serving the needs of telecommuters and those who want to become telecommuters.

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