UK Buyers Guide

What to look for when buying products and services. A UK consumer guide .

Business Opportinities

 

The Business Opportunity

Looking for a business opportunity in the UK? Welcome to the jungle! Hopefully this article will help clear the path to success in finding the right business opportunities.

Let's firstly focus upon the UK Business Opportunities Market; there are a variety of vendors each with differing reasons for marketing their business opportunity.

There are those that create the idea or concept and sell it as an opportunity and maybe earn their living selling ideas. Bear in mind that if you are looking down this route, you are simply buying information on setting up a business idea. The person or company responsible for selling the business opportunity may not had tried and tested this business.

There are other business opportunity vendors who are successfully operating a perfectly genuine established business but are looking for partners in other regional areas. Don't mistake these for franchise opportunities; they might be on their way but not quite there yet.

If you are just buying this format from Ebay or other similar advertising mediums, ask yourself how many others like you are buying in to this business opportunity. Someone could be flooding the market with operators and diluting real opportunities to make money. On the other hand, if the vendor is being selective in finding his prospective business partner, look at it as a good thing.

Moving onto franchise opportunities. These are contracts that include licensing, distributorships, agencies etc. The concept is generally called 'business format franchising'. The franchisor grants the franchisee a license to trade using their corporate image, trademark or trade name.

Here's an example, let's say you want to open a burger restaurant. Would you want to open your own style brand and compete with other cafes and take-aways or buy into an established multi-billion pound corporation? It's still your business but you are riding on the reputation and experience of one of the big boys!

Checklist and guide to buying a franchise.

Business Opportunity Scams - The bargain eBook Store - turning a lemon into a lemonade

 

The worldwide web abounds with business opportunity scams, get rich quick schemes and simple honest ideas that are just 'pie in the sky' dreams.

The classic ones are where so-called 'dot com retired millionaires' have made so much money from their internet business that they want to 'give away' all their secrets for beer money.

Then there's the 'bankrupt to billionaire' where some guy accidently fell upon a business opportunity whilst he was filling out a phone, claiming his social security money and just beore the bailiffs arrived he was making hundreds of thousands of pounds, dollars, euros or whatever currency his business opportunity resides.

Nobody can protect you from getting your fingers burned because there are some really good sales pitches that actually sound good, and true ..too good? To good to be true? And you know the old maxim, if something sounds too good to be try, it probably is.

I once read an article - 'FIVE WAYS TO SPOT AN ONLINE SCAM' and it turned out that article was a red herring to promote an online scam!

Some business opportunity advisors warn us not to part with any money up front. What is 'upfront'? If the business oppoSadly, business opportunity scams affect the genuine business opportunities and often it is difficult to safeguard yourself.

Sometimes a misunderstanding can lead to a genuine ethical business opportunity being interpreted as a scam for no other reason than the investor didn't understand the full offer.

The other aspect is sheer misrepresentation of what could be a perfectly viable business opportunity but the vendor 'over-egged the omelette' - over sold it and made it sound too easy. Thus, the investor thought he/she was buying a turnkey business that once it was in their hands, money would pour out of it.

rtunity offers no details and is a secret that will be revealed upon payment, then it is good advice, don't pay for a mystery. You would certainly be buying the sizzle and not the sausage!

It may be that you are asked to purchase a tangible item such as a sales kit, instructions or stock that you cannot possibly start the business without, then an upfront fee is unavoidable as long as you know what you are getting for your money and you receive the items as described. On the other hand you may be asked for some sort of application fee or administrative fee. If you are not getting genuine product samples or sales tools then never pay any money upfront.

All businesses need effort to get started, they need marketing and promoting. Online businesses need to be found in major search engines so as much as an investor may be told that the profit is instant and will flood into your account overnight, we all know it won't.

Look out for the term 'resell rights', this generally means that you are reselling the item you have bought, over and over again. So, you are buying a business opportunity package where the product you have bought is the product you are selling.

Often to justify this in your own mind, you convince yourself that you are a smart guy and you bought it! - Therefore a lot of very intelligent people will do the same. You might be lucky and get your money back but as for all those zeros on the end of the pound or dollar sign...forget it.

A classic example is an eBook store; there is no doubt that the software behind it is very sophisticated in the sense that you buy an online store that will incorporate a search engine, probably hundreds or thousands of eBooks, an eCommerce shopping cart that will accept credit cards and even an automated dispatch system.

Ultimately earning you money 24/7 -

more about the eBook store business opportunity.