Category: Online Business

BizReport: New data released by PayOffline, from market research conducted by Shape-the-Future, demonstrates just how many U.K. shoppers avoid online shopping for fear of identity theft and credit card fraud.
When told of a new offline payment system, PayOffline, that is soon to be introduced in the U.K., the interest from those surveyed was huge with 80 percent asking to be informed when the service was launched.
“PayOffline has mass market appeal; all our extensive research indicates that there is a huge pent up demand from all sections of the U.K. population,” said Steve Berry, Managing Director, PayOffline. “PayOffline will also make Internet prices available to everyone and provide a safe and secure payment option without the risk of fraud or identity theft.”
The new service will allow those in the U.K. who have no bank account (c. 4 million) and the one-third of the population who have no credit card, to shop online. It is also an option for those worried about giving out their personal financial information on the Internet and the youth market that may not be eligible to use credit services.
The offline payment system is also an opportunity for online retailers to increase business from existing online shoppers, 65 percent of those surveyed claimed they would shop more online if an offline option was available.

Offline payment system for online purchases to launch in U.K. [BizReport]

About Entrepreneurs: Here’s the thing about making money online..
Simply put, there’s no magic bullet. The ways you can make “big money”, i.e., more than, say, about $10-$15 an hour, typically require at least two of the following three things:
Investment – Free tools are typically advertiser supported, which means you can’t run as much advertising yourself and can’t make as much money. Or they’re open source software (like the WordPress blogging tool I described in the article you referred to), which require some degree of skill to use. You could build your own full-fledged e-commerce site, selling affiliate products, running advertising, blogging, and so on, for just the cost of very cheap hosting (less than $20 a year). But if you want to do that with no technical knowledge, no HTML knowledge, you’re going to spend more like $20-$30 a month or more.
Skill – If you know what you’re doing, there are a lot of free tools available. There’s also a whole genre of ways to make money by doing free trial offers and then canceling them. While that doesn’t take a great deal of skill, you have to be extremely organized in order to stay on top of them and do all the steps required to get the prize. People aren’t really going to give you a free XBox 360 or iPhone just for answering one little survey. Come on — think about it — the economics just don’t work.
Risk – There’s no absolutely sure, easy way to make money online at more than about $10-$12 an hour. To make more than that, you run the risk of making less than that, or even of losing money if you’re investing in tools (remember – I said you need two of these three).
Making Money Online [About Entrepreneurs]

CNNmoney: Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart were fresh out of high school seven years ago when they had the idea that would make them millionaires. After entering an Internet T-shirt design competition, the two Chicagoans thought maybe that was the way all T-shirts should be made.
Most stores print a bunch of shirts and lose money on the ones people don’t like. Instead, they figured, why not let customers rank designs ahead of time and then print only the winners?
The idea grew into an online store called Threadless that struck a chord with Web-savvy designers in Chicago and beyond; last year Nickell and DeHart sold $16 million worth of T-shirts.
The key to their success? High profit margins — the shirts cost as little as $4 each to make and sell for $15 and up — and a business model built on the care and feeding of an online community.
‘Project Runway’ for the t-shirt crowd [CNNmoney]