Any information such as the procedures, registration needed or any business license needed will be a great help.
I was thinking of helping my mom to setup one as she can cook alot of nice food, such as cup cakes, ruo mi fan, cheesecake, dumpling, moon cakes and Chinese new year goodies etc.
Suggested Answers
For online shop start ups, you don't need to register. The registration and tax filing is required when your sales volume reached a certain level.
However, It would be good to be registered with ACRA (Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority Singapore).
Here is what you can do:
You can easily set up a blogshop for free (www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com). It is good for testing your business model. If the blogshop business takes off, you can consider registering a domain (www.namecheap.com) and host (www.hostgator.com) it for a monthly fee.
With your blog setup, you can then post pictures of your mum's food products online.
Drive traffic to the blog using your FaceBook or Twitter account.
Set up a shopping cart (www.paypal.com) for people to order or simply give a telephone contact number for people to order.
It depends really on your business model.
Alternate Online Business Model
The YouTube Channel
The other the best way to start your business online is to create a YouTube channel rather than website.
One simple reason is because website take time to build
and yet is has less engagement when it came to cooking. You can still have
a simple website and try to create a blog post for your website each time
you created a video.
In Summary
If you really want to start an online business, here are the tips and secret.
First, never ever focus on building a website or e-Commerce but focus on how to get more traffic to your offer.
Here are the great business models to share with you.
1. Get your Offer (Business Opportunity, products, services
etc...).
2. Do your market Research (Online + Offline).
3. Start Your Marketing Strategies (Drive Traffic or
visitors).
4. Observe what your visitors charts (Keep track on what
your visitors like/don't like).
5. Fix to the right & start your profitable online
biz (Make money online).
Conclusion
To start an online business does not mean you must have a website. In fact online marketing is just a tool for business. Think out of the box and leverage the right platform for the right business when you want to promote it via online.
The key of your online business success is getting people to know about your blog/website in whatever you are selling. You got to let people know you before they can buy from you.
No matter how good your website looks or product is. If people don't know about it, it's useless.
