Starting an online business

[Madratlady]

I'm considering starting my own online business selling a particular type of product. Having done some basic research I can find 3 other businesses in this country selling a variety of brands of the same thing, as well as individual brands selling from their own websites.

I'm unsure how to work out whether my idea is viable or not. I want to be absolutely sure I now what I'm doing if I go ahead.

Any advice?

Erm - well first of all, have you wrote a business plan? can you compete with the other websites on price? on a professional looking site?

Honestly I'm in the earliest of stages of looking into this so I've not got as far as writing up a business plan. A professional looking site wouldn't be an issue. As for price, there doesn't seem to be much variation in price. The 3 other websites I can find all offer similiar prices, free postage, next day despatch.

Having looked further there are lots of smaller companies as well, harder to find initially and mostly with websites that really don't look great, but it looks like there'd be way too much competition.

I'd love to run my own business rather than being in employment but this doesn't look like a very viable idea as it wouldn't stand out from similiar businesses.

Initially in the starting phase you should analyze your market first. you should check your niche properly and analyze your competitors and competition for the products. for doing that you can hire a professional service also that will provide a detailed report on the product and its scope in the market in the upcoming time.
There are lots of market research service providers that provide such easy projects.

www.eminenture.com
keltonglobal.com/
www.polarismr.com/

Google takes a lot of different things into account when ranking sites and the time is has been around is one of them. If you are going to do your own SEO as opposed to paying someone you might want to get a book on it and take some time to research. (People say books are out of date before they are published, but much of the stuff about site structure and so on is still valid.) Google also tells you what you can do to improve your ranking. Good luck - it's a lot of work but interesting.

that should say 'the time it has been around' :)