First of all starting an online business does not need a huge capital. We only need a little fee for a domain name and a hosting server which cost less than $20. As for a brick and mortar business, we need at least $20,000 for rental and renovation of premises. An online business can be set up within days or even hours if you are good at it but offline business may need months to from planning till to open shop. As there are lots of nitty-gritty things you need to attend to such as license application, water & electricity installation, stock order, shop design and furniture arrangement and many more.
For an online business selling ebooks for example, there is no need to rent a place to store their books whereas their offline counterpart, a bookshop for example, they need to have a storeroom for putting stocks of books which need a systematic method of storage and personnel to take care of the stocks. Doing an online shop can be handled by yourself alone where as offline shop needs a handful of staffs to take care of respective departments such as finance, operation, marketing, human resource, store and etc. To hire such a group of people require further cost every month. Together with other overhead costs like, water & electricity, transportation and handling charges, the monthly revenue will be greatly reduced as compared to an online business which does not need to have all these overhead costs and can enjoy a higher margin of profits.
The market for a conventional shop is only within a certain town or location in a particular country where as an online store can sell to anyone, anywhere around the world who has access to internet. According to statistics there are around 1.8 billion internet users last year and growing. So you can imagine the earning potential as compared to those in a brick and mortar business.
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