Selling On-Line

I have a customer who has a single inexpensive product he sells on the Internet. I set him up with his own domain name, a web page with an e-mail address and an order form on a secure server. People submit their credit card numbers in the simple order form and he ships the material. Operating cost is US $40 per month plus Internet access.

I have another customer who has 5,000 products. He wants to have a catalogue on the Internet and on CD and market and sell via the Internet. We're just talking about possibilities at the moment because it is far from clear how this can be accomplished effectively at a reasonable cost. He is a wholesaler so that a typical order from one of his customers would be for many different units but he also has to decide whether to take single orders. A "shopping cart" system would be needed and we would probably need a system of payment authentification because the products are quite expensive. Since the visual aspect is very important, we'll have to have photogrpahs of the products and will require server space for around 100 megabytes - but at comparatively low traffic. To assemble the required services and to construct this web site from scratch would be very expensive and the monthly operating costs would be very high.

There are many malls and many successful commercial sites on the Internet but I've found most of them difficult and time-consuming to use. If you're looking for something specific, it is often faster to go through a search engine than to start browsing through the layers of a typical commercial site or to start wading through their own search systems. In addition, many commercial sites are manipulative in that they will guide you to certain pages whose owners have paid premiums. While some of the large computer and software companies have well-organized sites, the costs are out of reach for the typical small business.

A site which offers some guidance in this and which gives some good models to use for Internet commerce is found here. While it is still less expensive for the single-product vendor to set up independently, more complicated businesses will save money by following some of the recommendations on this site and by using packaged services.

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