There is a big difference between an online business, and a business with an online presence.

If you are truly an online business, then your primary intention is to do business online. You might make your products offline, or store them offline, but most of your business takes place over the wires.

On the other hand, if you own a store or perform services that don’t take place online, and you don’t do business transactions online, you are a traditional brick-and-mortar type of business. You may have a website or a blog, you may work to develop an online presence, and you may even answer questions via email, but that doesn’t make you an online business.

For example, assume for a moment that we have a company that makes and sells mass air flow sensors and mass flow control valves. Whether the company is an online business or just has an online presence, it has to have a manufacturing plant, engineers who work in little cubicles, etc. None of that can be done online, either way. However, the key is how the company markets, sells, and distributes their products. An online company would do the vast majority of this, if not all of it, via the Web, while a traditional company with a solid online presence would have a website but would handle sales in an actual store or via telephone.

As another example, take two major bookstores that make major numbers of sales online: Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. The name says it all: Amazon is almost always followed by “dot-com,” while Barnes & Noble is just Barnes & Noble. The difference is primarily in the fact that Amazon.com, while it has physical warehouses and workplaces and employees, does not have a physical store. Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, may sell a lot online, but it still is known primarily as a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Which kind of online company are you — the hybrid type that has a store and a website, or the true online company that does the vast majority of its business online?

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