5 Reasons Your Online Business Doesn’t Need an Office

 

The need for a brick-and-mortar office is far less than it used to be, with the advent of online business. Many businesses still need an office to operate, but the nature of ecommerce affords you certain advantages, including the opportunity to avoid the cost of maintaining a free-standing office. And that’s the bottom line—keeping it open costs money, which a lot of small businesses simply cannot afford to needlessly spend.
 

1. Product Presentation

If you’re running a web-based business, then your customers can easily view all products, or information about your service, online. In fact, that’s how most consumers prefer to look at a product, especially in the case of a company that mainly processes its transactions online. Have you ever visited an office for Amazon? They are doing very well without any walk-in traffic, whatsoever, and if you have an e-business, then you probably don’t need it, either.

 

2. Do You Really Need to House Your Employees?

The beauty of doing business through ecommerce is that your staff can usually work for you, remotely. Chances are if you run an online business, the people whom you employ do all their work from their own office or home; hopefully you are not one of the over-burdened business owners who is solely handling every aspect of your company. Either way, there is probably no need for a separate place to house you and your staff.

 

3. Point-of-Contact

One of the main purposes of having a brick building for your business is to provide a solid and clear point-of-contact for customers. The thing is—it isn’t necessary anymore. If you run a business that is completely self-sustaining online, then you must be an old-school, stubborn purist if you still want to pay monthly overhead to keep an office open. If it’s necessary, it’s necessary—but, you should carefully consider whether you really need to pay for a real office in a real building. Most likely, all your customers are perfectly happy to interface with you on the web.

 

4. You Don’t Need a Building to Convey Legitimacy

There’s no doubt that it looks good to have a real office—there is a certain reliable quality that it lends to a business; however, it’s important to remember that in the business world today, your website is virtually your office. What really matters is producing a great product of the best quality, and providing top-notch customer service. You could say that the rest is just semantics. Of course, the image that having a separate physical office shows to the public is a positive statement, but you can convey the same sense of reliability by the way you present your company online.

 

5. Online Transaction

One of the many virtues of running an online business is the nature of its transactions. Online customers are not swiping their credit card at a POS in front of a member of staff; they are typing numbers into your website and using PayPal. All of your transactions are happening online, so there is no need to be in-person at an office.

Having an office for your small business is by no means obsolete; in fact, if you can afford it and you find that it will help you to reach customers that you couldn’t otherwise reach, then it’s certainly not a bad thing to have. That may be the case for you because every business is different, but it’s likely that you can save a good deal of money by letting your company operate as what it really is—an online business.

 

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