8 Reasons Why an Online Business is Better

Taking the plunge to start a business can be the beginning of an exciting and rewarding adventure in your life. You’re dedicating yourself build your own wealth rather than working to make a boss rich. Still, there are some questions about how to proceed. A big one of these is whether to go the traditional brick-and-mortar business route or to start an online business. 

When many people think about starting a business, the first thing that pops into their head is a local retail store or perhaps a type of business offering a service from an office. Depending on the type of business you’re planning to start, having a physical storefront or office location may be your only option. Most local service businesses, for instance, can’t be run exclusively online. Dry cleaners, auto mechanic shops and restaurants need a physical presence for people to bring their clothes, cars or stomachs to. That being said, there are powerful incentives to pick a business model that can be done exclusively online. 

We discuss seven of these online business benefits below

Let’s start out with what would probably be considered the biggest benefit of online business over that of a brick-and-mortar business. All that brick and mortar costs money. To start a traditional business, you’ll need plenty of capital to get it off the ground. Unless you’ve done very well in what’s been your day job up to now or you have a rich uncle, this is going to mean begging banks for a loan. 

You have two major choices when getting a brick-and-mortar business up and running. You can find a good location where there’s already a vacant store or office space for lease or purchase. Alternatively, you can buy a parcel of land in a well-trafficked area and pay for all the necessary construction to turn it into an on-going concern. With an online business, there’s none of that. If you start an ecommerce store, all you need is a website and a place for your product. 

There are free, easy-to-use website builders online today that make setting up your own ecommerce website a breeze. When starting out, many e-commerce business owners can simply use their garage or the corner of a room in their home to store inventory. If it’s small and light enough to ship to customers, chances are it’s not going to take up too much space. If you go the dropshipping route or Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) route, you won’t even need space for your products. When working with drop shippers, they hold the product and ship it straight to customers for you after they’ve ordered it from your website. With Amazon’s FBA program, you simply have whatever product you sell through their website shipped straight to Amazon, and then every time someone orders from your Amazon store, they pick, pack and ship the items ordered for a reasonable fee. Contrast this with needing an expensive physical store presence to keep and sell your inventory through.

If you have a physical store, that store will need to have set store hours, so people will know when they can go there to buy stuff. This means someone has to be there to open it in the morning, and it has to be staffed until closing time. If you hire a manager but they call in sick, guess who has to show up to open it up that morning? That’s right, you have to since you’re the owner. Contrast this with an online store where orders can come while you’re asleep or watching TV, and then you can ship them out the next day. No more missing the son or daughter’s play at school or basketball game because you had to “be at the store.” This benefit is why starting an online business is a popular option for people who need to stay home for one reason or another. Some may have an elderly parent or disabled family member to take care of that they can’t leave alone for long. 

The most popular situation, of course, is a stay-at-home parent. This option not only enables mothers to stay home to care for very young children but also opens up the option of homeschooling as they get older.

The end of the above point sort of leads into this additional benefit, but it’s important enough that it deserves its own entry. Unlike a traditional business, it is always open. You might be taking a ski vacation over the weekend or going to the beach and come home to find you got a few dozen orders waiting to be shipped out on Monday. There are few greater feelings in the world than checking your computer to see that someone placed an order at midnight while you were sleeping. It would be prohibitively expensive to have a brick-and-mortar store staffed for such hours, and the low traffic when it’s extremely late at night or early in the morning probably wouldn’t justify the wages you’d be paying during such hours.

The choice of a brick-and-mortar business or an online business is actually a false choice, or at least, this is the case for someone starting a brick-and-mortar business. Even if you go the physical store or office route, you’ll be losing a ton of sales if you don’t have a good website and a solid digital marketing strategy as well. Approximately 46 percent of all searches on Google are people looking for a local business, which would be the traditional customer base for a brick-and-mortar company. 

So, even if your plan was to create an offline business, you’ll have to include an online presence for it anyway, so you may find it simpler and much cheaper to choose a type of business that lends itself to being completely online.

When you expand a business with a physical office or retail store location, things can get quite complicated. You face some tough decisions. Do you hire contractors to expand your current location, or do you buy, lease or build a second brick-and-mortar presence at another location? Do local zoning laws or the amount of available space on your existing property even make the first option possible? In contrast, expanding an online business couldn’t be simpler. You buy more inventory and kick your digital marketing efforts up to the next level. The big benefit here is that because you’re not having to spend money on buying or constructing a new location, all of your available money can go into product and advertising, which is what directly leads to more prospects and sales.

One of the biggest disadvantages of a traditional business with one or more physical storefront or office locations is being stuck in a given locality. Let’s be clear, you can move your business to another part of the country. Let’s also be clear that this is a lot of work, and you’ll undoubtedly be losing plenty of revenue from lost sales during the move before even counting the cost of moving so much product and equipment to a new location. 

An online business is comparatively wonderful in this regard. If your local market’s economy tanks, you don’t have to care. You sell nationally or perhaps even internationally, so the local economy where you live can be a figurative “dumpster fire,” and you’ll still be doing fine. Let’s take this location freedom benefit to another level. You might simply prefer living in another city or Country. When this feeling hits, there is no big business disruption consideration for you to move. If you have an e-commerce store, you may have to tell people that you’ll be delayed a few days in shipping orders, but that would probably be the worst of it. However, if you utilize drop shippers or Amazon FBA, shipments to customers won’t even be delayed. 

So far, we’ve only talked about an e-commerce online business. Perhaps you have an online blog that you generate revenue from. If you have an e-commerce business where you stock and ship the product yourself, you still can’t be away from the physical location of that product for too long because you need to ship it out. For a blog, however, all you need is a laptop, and you can keep that going from literally anywhere in the world. You can be globetrotting to your heart’s content, and post content from wherever there’s an internet connection.

In addition to the above benefit of not being tied to a particular location, online business owners are not dependent upon the workforce available in a particular area. Perhaps you are someone who really loves the great outdoors and wants to relocate to or already lives in a rural area without a lot of people around. If you had a traditional business in this situation, it may be difficult to find employees to staff your store or office. When your business’s location is virtual, however, your workforce is able to be as well. If you need content written for new pages on your website or for emails, there are dozens of freelancing websites where you can hire the services of a writer, and the transaction is simply handled over the internet. The same goes for any graphic design, digital marketing, accounting services or almost anything else you’ll need.

While it is considered easier to start a business now than ever before, the internet is really why this is the case. With free, easy-to-use website building sites, how-to videos and other information all over the internet and the low start-up costs of such an enterprise, online is the low-risk place for your new business. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve risked a minimum of money and time compared to a traditional business, but if it does start to take off, it’s easy to scale up to the level you need to meet your desired lifestyle. 

Whatever business type or model you choose, it may influence your decision to know that entrepreneurs tend to be healthier and happier than employees. This, plus the possibility of much greater financial rewards, makes starting a business an irresistible opportunity.