When you run a brick and mortar business, you can’t be all things to all people. You’re confined by geography, time, space, and labor. Until the age of the Internet, it was rare to find a competent one-stop shop. Even then, most of those were run by retail giants with millions of dollars and thousands of employees backing it up.
Then, along came the Internet, and with it the World Wide Web, and eventually e-commerce. This made it possible to provide a customer with more services, since goods could be shipped from nearly anywhere. It negated the need for hands-on inventory, and any basic storefront could be the middleman for any number of suppliers.
What does this mean for the average small Internet business owner? You have an expansive power over your local retail and service providers in that you have the ability to connect customers with goods that you’ve never seen, don’t supply, and aren’t near you.
How can you leverage this? Online there are three major ways you can accomplish this.
1. Outsourcing
If you do web design or copywriting, or another related service, you can outsource some of your work by finding...