Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

If you are one of the many businesses that have decided to create an online sales channel, there is a good chance that you are already operating a bricks and mortar business. If you do, you need to make sure that your online experience extends your business and doesn’t just duplicate it.

Think about it - the experience of a physical store is pretty basic. Products are lined on shelves, register at the front. People come in, browse around, perhaps buy something and then leave.  Read more...

Given the shredding Gordon Ramsay’s took this week during a trip to Australia, I thought it was probably a good idea to spend some time talking about managing your reputation, in your case when running an online business.

In the days before the web, a good business reputation was much easier to maintain. If you had bad service from someone, you would offer up the usual “I’ll tell all my friends not to come here”, and then maybe if you remembered, your displeasure would reach about a dozen people.

Jump ahead to the age of Facebook, Twitter, SMS (and any other means you use to keep in touch), and all of a sudden you face a very different beast. If a customer now experiences bad service, they have the ability to not only tell their friends instantly, but the opportunity to tell a whole lot of people who are followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook that can number in the hundreds or even thousands – and these are not necessarily even people they know that well, if at all.  Read more...