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Adventures in Internet Retailing
A Customer For LifeYou will always have more people that turn down your offer than actually buy. They might not have bought because of your price, ..... The first big surge in the ecommerce explosion came from business-to-consumer
(B2C) or retail sales. Companies such as America Online, Amazon.com, eBay and
Priceline.com became the first household names in ecommerce. Their leaders
became the names that replaced the old economy names during 1998 and 1999. We
ended the last century with Amazon.com's leader Jeff Bezos as Time magazine's
Article Submitter Pro ReviewIf you have ever submitted articles to gain website popularity, then you know how long the pain-staking process takes. Well, there is a new ..... Person of the Year. In the first couple of weeks of the new century, Steve
Chase led America Online in its purchase of Time Warner. Talk about heady
days and sky-high stock valuations.
The speed of the ascent was dizzying. In the early hours of the AOL Time
Warner announcement, news stories discussed a merger between Time Warner and
AOL. Half of a day went by before I realized that Time Warner wasn't the
company doing the buying. At that moment, it was still inconceivable that a
dot com could buy the leading offline company in its sector, no matter how
big the dot com. Of course, given what happened over the succeeding year, it
again seems inconceivable that a dot com could buy the leading offline
company in its sector. The dot com fall came fast and hard.
The fall actually came less than three months after the AOL Time Warner
announcement, in March 2000. But like the coyote who runs off the cliff
chasing the roadrunner and doesn't realize at first that he is no longer on
solid ground, the dot com world kept running along on thin air, not sensing
it would soon come to a very painful crash. Yet for all its smugness, the dot
com world got hit harder than it deserved when it crunched into solid ground.
AOL was one of the very few companies that had the wherewithal to grab
ownership of a traditional company at the high swell of the dot com bubble.
So where does that leave opportunities for niche sites in the scorched-ground
market of dot com retailers' As with most niche selling, you're left in
fairly healthy territory. You have a credibility gap to overcome with
potential customers. They will need more reassurance that you can deliver on
all of your service and security promises, but the customers are still
shopping online and their numbers are continuing to grow both nationally and
internationally month-by-month.
Be Human OnlineHow hard is it really to be human online' If you ran a brick and mortar business, wouldn't you be ..... This would be a lousy time to start a mass-market toy store such as eToys,
but this may be a very good time to launch a site that offers children's
educational software and books that support specific home-schooling
curricula. Consumers understand now that there is wealth of specialized goods
and services available on the Internet, and growing ......
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