Although some of us whispered "I told you so" as dot com after dot com curled up and died last year, the demise of so many e-commerce companies has put a damper on our own small business electronic efforts.
That seems to be the evidence, anyway, according to a Gallup survey sponsored by Verizon. In 2000, the poll shows, just 27 percent of small businesses with 50 or fewer employees had a Web site, an increase of only three percent over the year before. More telling, though, were the reasons given why small businesses built a site. More businesses said that they established a Web site to advertise and promote their firms, and not primarily to sell products. This attitude's is a complete turn-around from 1999.
I don't expect to reverse this trend all on my own, but I am a big believer in the power of the Net when it comes to sales. One way to get into the action: use a do-it-yourself, template based e-store builder. Store-makers help you avoid the high cost of hiring a Web designer or developer, presenting small and micro-businesses with a relatively low threshold to conducting e-business.
To decide if a template-made e-store is right for your business, use my four criteria for evaluating Web store-builders.
Costs of online stores vary widely, from nothing to a nut bigger than your small business can swallow. Unless your biz is flush with dollars, you need to scrutinise the price.
Cash-starved companies should steer for the free online e-commerce hosts. These sites provide store-building tools and then host the store at no charge, although some services, such as on-line credit card processing, come with a price tag.
Free e-commerce hosting sites come with certain problems, which can range from lame reporting tools to lousy uptime performance numbers. But the most overlooked risk is entrusting your e-commerce effort to a company which, because it depends primarily on Web advertising for revenue, may not have the legs to go the distance. Last month, for instance, Bigstep slashed its workforce by 20 percent in an attempt to get costs under control.
Any hosting service can go out of business, of course, but these free store hosts come with special baggage: because you build your store using their tools (not an HTML-code cutter like FrontPage), there's no way to back up the store locally and FTP its content to another service. If Bigstep goes down, your Bigstep built e-biz also dies.
Pay to play
For pay stores, costs run the gamut from piddly to pricey, but between US$50 and $100 a month is typical for a small to medium shop. (Most hosts define size by traffic, storage space, number of products in the online catalog, or a combination of two or more of those characteristics.) Yahoo Store, for example, costs $100 per month for a store with 50 or fewer items, while an e-store at Earthlink, with 1.5GB of monthly data transfer rights and room for 100 products, runs $80 a month.
Even with their inherent risks, I like the free stores -- you can't beat the price. Cost isn't the sole factor, however, in choosing a template-based store for your small biz -- another determiner is design.
