Tuesday, April 19, 2005

The inner workings of e-commerce

This week I've asked several people (who actually care about the subject) "what's the most important thing you have to have to do e-commerce?" Here are the answers they give me:
  • a privacy policy
  • a "cool name"
  • a usable, navigable Web site
  • something that tells visitors to your site who you are and what you do
These are all interesting answers. And I don't buy into any of them.

My favorite brief description of what you need to do e-commerce is found in Spector's book amazon.com: Get Big Fast. Here's the list:
  1. A product or service that can be sold over the Internet.
  2. The ability to handle remote transactions.
  3. Service provider support.
  4. A strategic plan that incorporates, but is not dominated by, e-commerce.
The ability to handle remote transactions includes at least one, and possibly two, characteristics: first, you have to be able to handle online payments -- and you can use a service like PayPal for that, so no excuses; second, you MAY have to be able to access and update a database for each transaction. The CGI you need to know for that is not very difficult, and neither is the JavaScript you might use, but it's likely you can find those both free or cheap from a third party, and possibly even from your own service provider if you have a good one. So again, no excuses. The difficulty is in learning the terminology and discerning the price to pay for these services.

It seems to me that the toughest part of e-commerce is integrating a plan for it into an overall business strategy. Part of the collateral damage of the dot-com collapse of the late 90s was the inability of even successful "brick and mortar" businesses to do just that.

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posted by Ron @ 10:41 PM

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