First and foremost, ecommerce is the fastest growing platforms in the market today. Starting an online sale can boost your overall sales but it is not that simple. Along with setting up the website and generating leads, starting an online ecommerce business in Singapore requires proper planning. Also, it entails an investment of time and lots of creativity to build a good ecommerce platform for your customers.
Before starting an online ecommerce business in Singapore, you must understand the need and purpose of your business and define your customer according to that. Beginning a business requires proper planning, brainstorming failing which, the business doesn’t sustain for long. To sustain the idea and to make a profitable business, one must research their business needs and customers need. Additionally, analyze the potential of the business planning on how to begin the business, develop marketing strategies.
Research and analysis before beginning the ecommerce is an essential step but proper planning is important to combat the challenges:
Every business requires a regulatory framework which has to be understood deeply. There are some legal laws which might increase the overall cost. Besides, there are some tax benefits which can help you in raising funds. Planning your resources beforehand can help you in minimizing the risk of the business.
For beginning the operations of the business, you must incorporate business. For example, the business structure that you choose will determine the taxes, the liabilities, and capital required for investment.
In Singapore, a private limited company is the most common business structure. It has multiple advantages such as:
You can easily establish a private limited company in Singapore where the business procedure will take up to 24 hours to complete.
To run an online business, you might need a supporting infrastructure with an efficient team to make a successful business online. This includes tools for promoting sales, delivering the orders to customers, IT systems, support the functional areas of online business. The online business operations will run smoothly if you have a good supporting infrastructure that matches well with your strategies.
Following is a list of the necessary infrastructure which you will need:
Right marketing will bring traffic to your website. We often see a lot of ecommerce spending lot of money on online advertising which doesn’t work good in the long term. A better approach to website marketing is by developing the right content about the product or service. Good content brings traffic to your website and your brand awareness increases when the visitors start sharing your content. Thus, you can develop a network of followers. The right content will land up in search engines like Google. Therefore, boosting your traffic to the website.
A good website that ranks good in google is important to make sales in online marketing. It is important to have proper IT Infrastructure for smooth functioning and customer support. Depending upon the investment that you would want to make, you can choose the best amongst the following options:
As a part of ecommerce, it is important that you must deliver the product or services which your customer has ordered. Hence, it is important that you maintain necessary staff, inventory, and staff to deliver the advertised product on the ecommerce which your customer has ordered. An online business fails only when you fail to deliver the ordered products of the customers.
Singapore has an option of home office scheme where you can run an office from home. Those authorized to live in Housing development board can run a business from their home. Make sure that your business doesn’t fall under the forbidden list. You can use a part of the residential premises for official work. To set up an office at home, register with the housing and development board or the urban redevelopment authority. Then, meet all their terms & conditions and duly comply with them. To begin office from home, your business must be registered with the Singapore Registrar of companies.
Setting an online business doesn’t require plenty of money. However, you need to invest in start-up cost, advertising cost, and marketing cost. Don’t forget to include office rental, staffing, maintaining inventory, and many other operational costs. Hence, proper planning of funds flow is important if you want to run an online business in the long run.
Books of accounts need to manage properly. Hence, you can effectively maintain books through in-house administrative activity or by outsourcing the work. For managing orders and accounts, entering the data in books is an important step so that the information can be managed by the company.
Some of the commonly sold items online in Singapore are:
There are some success factors for running ecommerce business in the long run:
Internet is considered as the broadcast media for regulatory reasons in Singapore. Besides, this falls under the category of SBA (Singapore Broadcasting Agency). All the broadcasting services such as Internet service provider and internet content providers need to be licensed. The owners and other persons need to be licensed and will not need a separate application for the same.
All the content and licensees should comply with the Internet code of practice as it prohibits broadcasting objectionable content. The Internet code of practice is limited only to the local ICP’s since they cannot control the content coming from outside Singapore.
There are some rules and regulations which are applicable to the goods or services that you sell online. Following are some of the examples:
There are web contracts which bounded by the Singaporean Contract Law. The Electronic Transaction Act was introduced in the year 1998 which boosted the trust of the customer by giving web contracts a legal face.
Here are certain provisions that protect the consumer:
There is a dire need to protect the intellectual property for transferring information. Trademark and copyright are of particular importance in this industry.
You need to copyright all the creative work that you transfer to the internet. Copyright Act protects copyrights. Copyright is an important part of the internet so that your creativity doesn’t get copied, broadcasted. Hence, copyright protects your intellectual property right once the work in the tangible form has been expressed on the internet. Copyrights are licensed to the owners.
The copyright act was spread to the internet to protect the owner’s right in the digital world. The owners have protection against their electronic copies. Activities such as browsing website, caching the website for better access is not entitled to copyright protection.
A trademark is a symbol which is used to distinguish between the services of the owner with that of the other companies. A trademark gives the companies the right to refrain all the other products and services of a different business from using a similar mark. You can register trademark under Singapore Trademark act or for international registration through Madrid Protocol. Thus, trademarks can help you to avoid infringement of a trademark.
Since the global market is huge, there are chances that the trademarks will clash. So the businesses must be careful while using meta tags to avoid infringement of the trademark. Meta tags are the keywords which are responsible for ranking your page in Google. Since meta tags are not visible, some companies use the trademarks of famous companies to make the Google index their web page. Hence, the user will land up in the fraudulent page instead of genuine site. Under such circumstances, the owner of the original trade mark can take legal action against the fraudulent webpages as per Singaporean Laws.
As a reminder, it is important to be careful about the domain names while doing online business. There are web squatters who reserve the domain names for the trademarks and these are later sold to the squatters and also to their competition. Hence, it is important to register the trademarks at the earliest so that you don’t infringe other trademarks.
Singapore court has the right to solve disputes of ecommerce if:
The legal laws are applicable to solve the dispute. There isn’t any specific rule in cases of dispute that the country’s law will be applicable over the claim’s jurisdiction. If the contract of ecommerce doesn’t specify the country’s jurisdiction then Singapore Court can resolve the dispute. The Singaporean court and the court will pass the judgment based on the law connected closely to the contract.
Singapore is a central hub for trading located in the Southeast of Asia. The online opportunities in Singapore are plenty. Well, the country has got very high-frequency access to the internet along with high speed and deepest level of internet penetration.
Setting up ecommerce in Singapore can be a terrific business here. However, setting up an online business requires time, skills, efforts, investment and political connects to run it successfully. An online ecommerce business requires proper planning to make it as a successful business.
Hence, if you are interested to start an online ecommerce business in Singapore, read more from local corporate service provider in Singapore who can assist you along the way.
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