The part which makes or breaks a business like this is the website management and maintenance. Don't assume that once the site is online, your work is completed. If people are to return to the site, it will need to have fresh content in order to make the site "sticky". Since this is the most important part of your online business it is very important to be able to keep the administrative tasks to a minimum. One of the best ways to achieve these objects is to automate all possible marketing as well as administrative procedures of online selling.

The ultimate in automation is when all automated functions can be pre-programmed to be carried out at regular intervals with an in-built scheduler. You can go on holidays and have everything carried out for you in your absence as if you were sitting at your terminal for the duration. There are many E-Business Automation Systems available that automate the entire web marketing procedure along with many of the redundant administrative tasks. This is like running your business on "Auto Pilot". One of the most popular tools is discussed below:

QuickPayPro.com

QuickPayPro is a remotely-hosted ecommerce automation system that includes a shopping cart system, secure, real-time credit card processing, digital product delivery, affiliate marketing system, ad tracking, mailing list manager and email marketing autoresponders.

This system is available at a reasonable monthly cost and is easy to set up on your website. Some of its other features are:

• Sell digital or "real" products and services.
  
  
• Single-product order form or full shopping cart version.
  
  
• Secure, real-time credit card processing, with or without a merchant account.
  
  
• Supports payment gateways such as 2CheckOut, PayPal, PaySystems, Revecom, Authorize.net, QuickCommerce, EMS and SkipJack.
  
  
• Digital product delivery with automatic download link expiration.
  
  
• Two-tier affiliate marketing system with real-time statistics for both your affiliates and yourself.
  
  
• Option to export affiliate commission payments to upload and pay via PayPal, or import into Quickbooks or other applications for automated check writing.
  
  
• Ad tracking system and sales calculators for web site and email advertising.
  
  
• Unlimited email mailing lists.
  
  
• Unlimited sequential follow-up autoresponders.
  
  
• Mail merge personalization.
  
  
• Customizable order and thank you pages to fit your site's look and feel.
  
  
• Remotely-hosted - Manage account using any web browser.

Some Warnings

The fact is, just because you can make money on the web, it doesn’t mean that the streets of the Internet are paved with gold. Like any opportunity, there are scams and hazards. As you set up your web business it’s important to stay alert, use common sense, and keep your feet firmly on the ground.

First of all, don’t be tempted by get-rich-quick schemes that promise you instant wealth with no investment of time or effort. There are lots of these on the Internet. One of the most popular are those emails that fly around every now and then from someone claiming to be a wealthy political dissident who’s having trouble getting a huge sum of money out of their (normally African) country. They’ll ask you to open an account put some money in it and they’ll add the rest in return for a fat commission.  Lots of people have fallen for this scam.  It’s very real and very risky!