Selling products online may sound like an easy strategy. But scores of companies have still managed to completely muck it up.
In Australia and elsewhere, online retailers have been struggling to recover from the post-boom hangover that left many fighting for life or simply unable to continue. In many cases, shareholders' collective demand that online companies turn in viable financial results were too much for companies where fiscal responsibility had been a secondary concept to big spending and big talking.
Now, unless you can justify a rapid return on investment for your company's Web site and online presence, it may suddenly become a lot harder to sell such projects to the board.
Experiment
Getting your online formula right is going to take a lot of experimentation, and if you've already jumped into online selling you can be sure the site will require constant updating and improvements.
You may even need to completely reconsider your online strategy, if your online presence isn't returning the sorts of profits and customer interaction you think it should.
There are certainly ways to make sure your online selling efforts don't go unrewarded, but a surprisingly large percentage of companies have no idea how to best make the move online. And, as in everything, the mistakes of the past can be an extremely valuable lesson for those now making the journey.
Not totally new
When businesses of all kinds first started jumping into e-commerce, many made the fatal mistake of believing the hype about the Internet being a completely new kind of business model.
Sure, it's a different way of customer interaction and it forces companies to become a bit more cutting-edge instead of relying on established business practices. But the absolute worst way to make this happen was to isolate Internet development efforts from the rest of the business.
This sort of segregation was often meant to let companies' online arms develop at their own speed and have equal access to resources back in the main organisation. It may also have been a way of insulating the main company from what used to be perceived as considerable risk; if online efforts hadn't taken off, the offending limb could be lopped off much more easily if it was operating on its own.
But this business structure had the opposite effect. With newly created online arms set onto the task of building an Internet presence, many companies combined content thrown at them from myriad sources within the company--and ended up with simple brochureware sites consisting of loads of static HTML pages drolly describing products, company history, and vapid mission statements. Those sites that did sell product only offered a most basic inventory and often processed everything by hand; weeks-long shipping delays confirmed that this was simply not the right way to go about online selling.
