So the Internet levels the playing field for small businesses, right? Sounds good -- until you consider that successful selling online is tightly tied to effective technical execution, and this is hard to find cheap. So what's a small biz to do? Richard's here to help you find flexible e-commerce solutions within budget.
Today we’re rerunning the first installment of Richard’s popular 11-part series on how to build an e-commerce site for $6,500 or less. At the end of the article are the links to each part.
I’m here to tell you that this whole “…the Internet levels the playing field, allowing small businesses to compete with big ones…” line you’ve been hearing is a load of crap.
Successful selling online is tightly tied to technical execution. And it is the kind of technology that requires experienced technologists to administer — people who are in short supply. And only the big companies can afford to hire those people full-time.
I can hear the Unix-heads out there in the audience start to chime in.
“Do it in PERL, PHP, and MySQL, dude! It is free!”
Right, like Jeff Bezos sat down one weekend with “PERL for Dummies” and developed Amazon.com’s one-click buying technology. Even if that were possible, what small business owner has the time or inclination to learn how to write PERL programs?
I’m here to tell you, “dude,” that the choice of what technical solutions to use requires skills and knowledge outside the resources of a typical small business. And hiring consultants to do it for you is dangerous because if you don’t really understand what they are doing, you are pretty much screwed if what they built is mission critical and it breaks (and programs break more often in this industry than anyone wants to publicly admit).
Furthermore, the financial margin of error for a small business is extremely narrow by comparison to a big business. If Jeff did decide to write his own PERL solutions and blew $10,000 doing it only to learn that was the wrong answer, it is no big deal. $10,000 is probably the monthly paper clip budget at Amazon.com. But $10,000 is a huge hit for a small business — the kind of hit that can put it out of business.
No, the playing field is never really level for those reasons.
But small guys have some distinct advantages. Namely, they have lower overhead, are closer to the customer, and can turn their business models on a dime. And the ability for any small business to exploit these advantages in the online world hinges on their choices of technology to make it all go.
That is what my weekly ramblings are about. How small businesses with limited resources can take off-the-shelf stuff and put it together into a flexible solution so the playing field at least begins moving from vertical to horizontal.
So let’s set the stage for future articles by outlining what I think are essential systems any small business needs to get an e-commerce site up and running. And, to make things more interesting, I’m going to stay within a total budget of $6,500.
Essentials a Small Business Needs on the Web
If you didn’t catch this series the first time around and want to read the rest of it, here are the links:
A Hosting Solution for Small Business (4/21/2000)
Web Site Development Tools for Small Business (4/28/2000)
Your Merchant Account and “Puffy Director Pants” Taxes (5/5/2000)
Shopping Cart Options for Small Business (5/12/2000)
Embracing the Email Demon (5/19/2000)
Email Marketing Solutions for Small Business (5/26/2000)
Order Tracking: Slick and Easy (6/2/2000)
Traffic Analysis Solutions for Small Business: Part 1 (6/9/2000)
A Traffic Analysis Solution for Small Business: Part 2 (6/16/2000)
A Promotional Strategy That Won’t Break the Bank (6/23/2000)
