Retail on the Internet

Starting a company on the internet is difficult. While the bars have been lowered on the technical side, in that it is easy to bang together a web site in an afternoon, register it everywhere, and be in the Google index in a day, actually getting people to your web site can be difficult. Then getting them to actually spend money on your web site can be even more problematic. Marking Pilgrim points out that:

I am asked constantly by friends what they can sell on the Internet. I always want to ask them why they think that I would share potential goldmines. My company has a software platform and system that can launch a sophisticated retail website within a few days. If I think of a good product to sell, I can be selling it by next week. The fact is that it is not so easy to come up with new products to retail online these days. Source: Marketing Pilgrim

All business is based on the idea of finding a customer pain point and making a product around that. Or making a product, or selling a product that address a specific need. I know that this is Business 101, but still needs to be stated. The differentiation comes in if you can find a neat way to sell it, advertise it, or otherwise marketing it.

Web 2.0 provides some pretty snazzy ways of dressing up an otherwise flat e-commerce site. The more help the site provides the better. If you were to open an Amazon associates site, and had copious help files, or description files of the target object that would be really cool. The problem is that you don’t make hundreds of pages of content in a day, or even a month.

You have to think through the site, and know what your competition is doing, how they are doing it, and what their relative ranks are. One site that uses the best ideas from other sites (without violating copyright or fair use) and mashes them up into something that is truly useful would be a good web site to go shopping at.

There is still room for business on the internet, but users need more than a flat site, and want to see some neat stuff along the way, want others to comment on the product, and want to find it easily. The site that can deliver all that good stuff in one package will most likely win if they can advertise it enough, and make enough money to survive.

On line business is looking a lot like a bricks and mortar business, find the right products, find the right neighborhood, work with the community, advertise, offer specials, and have stuff that people will want. Make it easy to purchase, browse, and research, then maybe you will have the best site to purchase a specific product.