Building E-Commerce Websites

Prior to the "dot-com" crash of 2000, the marketplace was filled with businesses that wanted to sell online. Many ill-conceived business plans were enabled by venture capital with the primary motivation of getting their companies to an I.P.O. Perhaps the most detrimental result of all that hype was that genuine businesses with solid products and markets got caught up in the rush and made many costly mistakes (paid out of their own earnings, not from venture capital). After the bubble burst, e-commerce companies closed their doors. At that time companies that invested their own money realized that the online market wasn't as easily grabbed as they'd hoped. Additionally, the expensive and complex e-commerce systems that they hastily built, trying to keep up with the "dot-coms," were extremely buggy and undependable. Many companies were seriously hurt and their expectations were entirely unmet.

Today the dust has mostly settled and businesses are looking again to the web for opportunities to expand their market. Fortunately, expectations are much more realistic today than they were a few years ago. Businesses have more realistic expectations about the profits an e-commerce site may provide. However, they still tend to have unrealistic expectations about the relative ease and expense of building an e-commerce site. While it is certainly possible to create a relatively simple and inexpensive e-commerce site, there are some factors, unique to e-commerce that can be complicated. This newsletter will define and describe some of these factors and provide some guidance in determining the relative complexity of building an e-commerce site.