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We have all heard them, the stories of small businesses who inched out onto the web in the early days of e-commerce with their home spun products and to their great astonishment found that enough people wanted to buy their stuff that they made a fortune. Like all urban myths, these stories are based on a little bit of fact and a lot of hype. Well there doesn’t seem to be any agreement on when the first e-commerce site launched or what it was. The primary business to consumer presence on the Internet initially was from small businesses looking to expand their existing market. In the late 1990s, I worked for a web development company in Portland Oregon. This development company focused on e-commerce sites because that’s where the money was. A retail business owners were ready to pay web developers a lot of money to build them a web site that promised to increase their sales. Typical businesses were a golf pro shop, a store that sold electronic audio equipment for cars and a small business that sold imported women’s clothing. First generation e-commerce web sites were either plain or down right ugly. Remember, those were the days when the AOL browser didn’t support Html tables. And so sites that wanted America Online customers had to build without the table tag. Download speeds were excruciatingly slow. So graphics were minimal if available at all. Still, if a company had something that people wanted and couldn’t find themselves locally, there was a good chance for success. Good examples of this are things like reproduction lighting fixtures and supplies for reptile pets. Very different product lines but very much the same in the size of their market niche and product availability. Generally the product was already familiar to the customer and the customer was looking for the opportunity to buy it. Now there’s a great situation for a sales business. As more and more businesses went online, the speculators and scam artistes came along with them. Dishonest vendors could set up a web site in a day or so, advertise, accept as many orders as they safely could in as few days as possible, then close down and disappear and start the process all over again with a different web host. With the success of small niche market e-commerce sites, bigger businesses started considering a web presence. One of the earliest large companies to move into e-commerce in a big way was Egghead, a national chain selling software, computers and electronic equipment. Egghead spent many thousands of dollars developing a sophisticated web site with multiple purchasing options and advanced searching and product placement. They launched and carried out a massive marketing campaign to drive customers to their site for all their electronic needs and it succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Egghead was completely unprepared for the onslaught of web based orders and customers experienced month long delays. Well, Egghead scrambled to fulfill and ship customer orders. Returns were delayed even longer and customer service was a long distant memory. The site itself was also not capable of handling the number of visitors Egghead received and users experienced site down time, batched pages and constant errors. Eventually, as could be predicted, visitors stopped visiting and customers stopped ordering. Egghead began having trouble meeting their financial obligations and its rocky road only just recently stabilized when it became a partner with Amazon.com. Other sites with a more slow and steady growth in their e-commerce presence did well from the beginning and continue to improve. The best companies ignored the hype and provided their customers with a positive sales experience by showing them the products available, charging a fair price, shipping the product quickly and handling quickly any problems or returns. All of these characteristics are good, basic business practices. E-commerce doesn’t change any of them.
Course: | Introduction to E-Commerce |
Author: | Darcey Spears |
SKU: | 33628 |
ISBN: | 1-932808-79-5 |
Release Date: | 2005-08-25 |
Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 102 lessons |
Work Files: |
Yes |
Captions: | No |
Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |