A guide to third sector trading - WCVA

It’s an idea, but is it business? A guide to third sector trading
1: Getting
started
2: First steps 3: Business
planning
4: Legal and
governance
5: Funding
and
resourcing
6: Financial
controls
7: Managing
growth
8: Management
and
governance
9: Social
enterprise
10: Sources
of support
What’s involved in online trading?
New but not newfangled: Online trading is no more complicated
than running a conventional shop. But it’s a relatively new way of
doing things, so the practicalities may seem unfamiliar to those
who have not used this form of selling before. Even so, huge
numbers of people are regular customers of sites such as eBay and
Amazon, so there’s really nothing newfangled about this way of
doing business. And most people in business today do not find it
difficult to take the simple first steps of advertising their goods and
services to potential customers by email.
The basics: If you are interested in online trading, here’s what you
need to get to grips with:
• basic decisions about how interactive and self-contained the
online trading experience will be for customers
• basic regulations governing the way online trade is carried out
• setting up and maintaining the website where the trading will
take place
• systems for responding to orders
• marketing and promotion to make the business work.
Contracts: Contracts with customers on the internet are
necessarily different from those reached face-to-face or
conventionally in writing. The regulations and the software you
use mean that it is fairly clear what you need to do and how you
will operate in practice.
Charities:
• The trading name: It is important that trading organisations
make it clear on their web site exactly which organisation
their customers will be dealing with. If it’s a subsidiary trading
company you must operate under this name rather than that of
the parent charity.
• Donations: It is good practice to keep the trading facilities
quite separate from any online giving arrangements to avoid
confusion for users.
Organisational capacity: The fact that setting up a site is fairly easy
also means that third sector organisations may be tempted to start
online shops before they have developed the capacity to run them
properly. Don’t risk it. There is too much which can go wrong.
• Attention to detail: It is just as easy on line – perhaps even easier
– to alienate your customers with poor presentation, misleading
information, out-of-date shop windows, late deliveries and
generally poor service as in face-to-face trading. The web is a
minefield of infuriatingly outdated information, and you won’t
get return customers if your site is contributing to it.
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