Big Help for Small Businesses

Our favorite offerings for e-commerce businesses are easy enough for novices and cheap enough for even the smallest small-business owner

by Catherine Holahan

Max Hill's image of a perfect retirement was his favorite pastime. The 66-year-old Texan pictured himself standing on a vast green, holding a shiny old hickory club, and watching a small white ball sail far away into a clear blue sky.

Initially, Hill did not imagine his dual hobbies of golf and collecting antique clubs would become a business. Yet, thanks to the ease of e-commerce technologies for small businesses, retirement from the corporate world was the start of Hill's new career as the owner of HickorySticks.net, an online antique golf store.

How Hill transformed his hobby into a business is illustrative of what many small business owners can do with relatively little money and Internet experience. Hill got his site up and running four years ago with the help of a Web design firm that charged $3,000 to develop the site and a Web host company that stores Hill's data and connects him to customers for roughly $10 a month. Hill now fills several orders a week. "I am not a computer guy at all and the site works very nicely," he says.

We looked into some of the Web offerings for small businesses and determined which ones are easy enough for Web novices like Hill and cheap enough for the smallest small-business owner. Here are some of our favorites.

WEB HOSTING.

When first starting a site, many small businesses opt to rent space with Web hosting companies. The reasons are ease and price. For between $10 and $300 a month, depending on the company and site capabilities, Web host services provide domain names, IP addresses, e-mail, and space for the site on their massive, secure servers. They also typically throw in 24-hour customer service and downloadable software to help beginners design simple Web pages.

Netfirms, a Web host service with more than a million customers, including Hill, provides one of the best values on the Web for small businesses, with plans ranging from $4.95 to $14.95 a month. The company's most popular business option, the "Advantage" plan, costs $9.95 a month and includes domain names, a Web page design kit, and a 40-page step-by-step reference guide explaining how to set up the site. It also includes 24-hour customer support seven days a week.

Christopher Hebert, a marketing manager at the company, says Netfirms built its software to ensure that novices can use it. "With any of this, there is a bit of a learning curve, but we have a bunch of businesses that have gone from zero to 60 in a couple of days," says Hebert. "It's not out of the realm for a grandmother who knows nothing about computers and wants to start a small Internet business to be up and running on the same day."

Most impressively, Netfirms' Advantage plan includes 20 gigabytes of space on its server, enough to run sites laden with pictures and multimedia files, and 750 GB per month of bandwidth. Bandwidth, also known as data transfer, is particularly important for e-commerce sites because it is used every time a visitor views the images and text on Web pages. With 750 GB a month, a business whose site is laden with images and videos could serve more than a million visitors a month. A text-only site could serve billions of customers.

IN CONTROL.

Jeannine Ranni upgraded to Netfirms' CommercePro after paying a Web designer to host and run her site, embellishedbean.com, which sells gourmet coffee beans. The stay-at-home mom says the site, which was designed using Netfirms' templates, makes it easy for her to fill daily orders. "I have a control panel that I log onto daily that gives me all my Web stats, my visitors, and any orders. And once I click on the pending orders, it gives me an option to make labels and invoices," she says. "It links with the postal service, or whoever you want, to ship, and then it notifies the customer that the order has been shipped."