Your Questions About Doing Business Online World

Jere answers:

Simple answer is online degrees are as close to worthless as a degree can be. Why? Here’s quite an in-depth answer. Firstly lets understand as to what the purpose of college is in the first place. It’s to take classes and gain technical and academic skills in a field right? WRONG! College is in fact not much about learning skills at all. Most of the people I know hardly have any better skill sets than at the time of graduating high school. Rather, the college experience is more about acquiring life skills. Like time management, employment opportunities, interaction with professors, critical reason, taking independent decisions (inevitably failing and then picking yourself up), learning how to learn (this is an important one), public speaking, networking with people in your industry and finally, bullshitting. (well to an extent) And then comes gaining the actual skill sets and academic knowledge you went there for. If it is just the skills sets you are looking for, you don’t even need online degrees. If you are meticulous enough, you can learn more from reading books sitting at home, than from learning anywhere else.

Also the 2nd reason as to why online degrees get the bad rep, is for their lack of rigour. I have taken my fair share of online courses. Never took one that was nearly as challenging as most classroom college classes. In my hardest classroom classes, I had to stay up whole nights solving assignments. Never had to do that even in the hardest online class. Also there usually is a whole bunch of plagiarism involved in most online classes. My friend made a whole lot of money money by solving problems, assignments, writing essays and thesis papers for people who took online classes. Plagiarism happens in classroom situations as well, but the opportunities to cheat are far fewer as compared to the medium when your identity is just a username and password.

I understand in a day and time like this, college education is very expensive. So online classes seem a worthy option offering you subsidized education while providing you with the same degree at the end of it. But believe me, the degree is not what counts. You will be missing out on so many life changing experiences that significantly impact your long term future. It’s a completely different argument that most college students waste it away on booze and partying. But the ones that have their heads straight, succeed so much more. Online classes are just not the same. The opportunity to confront life changing experience just don’t exist.

The solution? Look into community college programs. There are hundreds of community college programs which have a link up with 4 year colleges. You study for 2 years in community college, and if the grades are decent enough, you can continue at a 4 year college for your senior years and graduate with a Bachelors degree. A rare few community college programs have programs where you can even make use of the resources of the parent university.

Employers completely get the hardship of paying for college. So they are very understanding of that and often hire competent students from community colleges. However in the case of Online degrees, good luck with that. You can be a contrarian and try your luck at that. And I am sure if you work hard enough, you will find a job. But are you willing to take such a huge risk, given that online degrees are NOT cheap? This is an irony coming from me as I failed out of a top 5 engineering school recently. But I am going back with a hardened attitude. The changes I have made in the last one year away from school have been the most profound in my life. Now I am flourishing. Please don’t sell your future out. That online degree is worthless to most employers AND more importantly you will be losing the opportunity to come face to face with the most important experiences of your life.

Jere answers:

If they are setting up shop in the online world, and the only form of payment they will accept is “Cash” (which is wiring money via Western Union is), then you need to look no further.

Jere answers:

What ever you choose, you should think of the shipping cost. If you start something on the net, you open yourself to the world.

Yahoo is a great place. Ebay is also a great place. Over here in Canada we have our postal services that offers to build a shop with them and linked the shipping directly.

You should visit some more places on the web before you choose.

Jere answers:

Yes, I have done business with gametag.com a few times now. I bought and sold a WOW account, and also sold my EVE online account to them. They have the best prices around that I can tell, and they are american as when I was verified the person I spoke with was clearly american on the phone. Overall, I have no complaints with them as like the other individual said that “most” companies are a scam.

I can tell you that I think they have stopped buying in wow though. My friend tried to submit an account to them, and they told them to try back later. However, I am not sure if that is the case now.

My only suggestion is deal with a first world country business. Never deal with China as they will simply screw you over in some way.

Jere answers:

Legally it does have to have a solid location, even if it’s not where you operate. You’ll need a business license for your area to operate. You’ll have to pay federal, state, and local taxes for that area. If you are selling something, you’ll also need a state sales tax number in many places.

Http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=98846,00.html

That should help you quite a bit. If not, see an accountant. The last thing you want to screw up is federal taxes.