Catering to your customers

The area you live in might dictate what your customer base is. I use to live in an area where the great majority of the population was young families with young children. I had a business that catered to children. It was not a sewing business. Later our family moved to an area that I did not investigate the population as much I should have. The majority of the population is older with many older retired couples. A child based business would have died a slow death so I opted to start an internet based sewing business that catered to active adults and older children.

The lack of local customers has not stopped me from starting and running my business. It has presented a challenge in advertising and marketing. I of course had to have a website. At first I tried the many free web hosting sites but I did not like the ads that they put on my site. If you are serious about having your business online you will need 3 things:

1. Your own domain name. Keep it short so you can put it on your business cards. The shorter the better so people can remember it.
2. Top quality website hosting. You want to look at price and a company that has very little down time. There is nothing worse than someone looking for your website only for them to find it is not available.
3. Some way to process payments to you. You can either have your own ecommerce account, that will handle credit card payments or use Google Checkout or PayPal.

About the only sewing based business that will have a hard time with internet sales is one that is based on tailoring or custom alterations. Your customer will have to meet with you at one point to get measured.