Have you ever heard of “the long tail”? It’s a term first used by Chris Anderson in an article he wrote for Wired magazine. In the article, Anderson talked about the new economic model upon us. The example Anderson used was online booksellers such as Amazon.com. Here’s the concept behind “the long tail”:
Booksellers sell books that fall into a wide range of popularity. At the left end of the scale are extremely popular, bestselling books that sell millions of copies. At the right end of the scale are books that top out at perhaps a few thousand copies. The right end of the scale is what Anderson calls “the long tail”.Traditional booksellers (the brick-and-mortar variety) tend to stock plenty of books on the left end of the scale, but getting a book on the right end of the scale into a bookstore is almost impossible because booksellers are concerned about having inventory on hand that won’t sell quickly.
The World Wide Web and e-commerce have changed all the rules when it comes to “long tail” items. No longer do booksellers have to sweat about having large inventories of product that won’t sell in large numbers. Instead, they can quite literally have no inventory at all for items in the long tail. When a long tail item is ordered, the bookseller can order it immediately and ship it to the buyer directly. In this scenario, the item never enters into the bookseller’s inventory.
Books are only one example of this concept. A list of products affected by “the long tail” is virtually endless. It’s a unique time full of possibilities for the entrepreneurs among us, and if you know how to take advantage of such opportunities, there’s serious money to be made.
Note
If you’d like to read Chris Anderson’s article in Wired magazine, you can access it by browsing to www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. Anderson has also written a book called The Long Tail that goes into detail on the concepts he presented in his Wired magazine article.
Anything can be sold on the Internet. In fact, it’s not at all necessary to have a complete storefront with a long list of items. Plenty of successful e-commerce ventures consist of only one or two products. If you have an audience and there is demand for what you’re selling, you can be successful.
Tip
If you’re going to sell something on the Internet, site traffic is key. It can literally make the difference between $20 and thousands of dollars of revenue per month.
Find sites that are related to your site and exchange links. The more Web sites that link to you, the better your traffic is likely to be because you will rank higher in search engine results.
One of the keys to a successful e-commerce business is time management. Chances are you aren’t going to have a full staff of people to do the work for you. It’s more likely that you’ll end up being the business manager, Web designer, public relations representative, and more. In other words, it’s a lot of work. If you’re going to be successful, you’re going to need to spend your time on those things that offer a good return on investment.
In most cases, building an e-commerce system is not one of those things. It can take months to build a robust e-commerce system, and then you’ve got to debug it, test it, and so on. Even after all that work, there’s a pretty good chance that serious bugs will slip by you, and many of them may compromise the security of your system.
You’re going to be much better off investing some money up-front into a company that will provide the resources you need. Not only will you benefit from the development efforts (and software testing) of someone else, but in many cases, you’ll also have a robust support system behind you. Many e-commerce systems are Web-based, and that provides the additional benefit of letting someone else deal with the hassle and expense of hosting the site. All you’ll need is a few pages that provide links into your e-commerce company’s system.
One of the most successful e-commerce solutions is Digital River (see Figure B.1), located at www.digitalriver.com. Digital River not only provides robust e-commerce tools for sellers, but it also operates a huge affiliate operation.
Note
Digital River focuses on selling software. If you’re selling something else on the Web, you’ll want to look for another option.
Digital River also offers a powerful credit card payment processing system and marketing for your product(s). They’re backed by a proven marketing concept based on affiliates. Your product gets a high degree of targeted exposure using this model because Digital River will keep your affiliates updated automatically with all the latest information and incentives on your product.
If you’re offering a product that requires protection via digital rights management, Digital River can help you there, too. They produce a software product called Software Passport (also referred to in the industry as Armadillo) that is second to none when it comes to protecting intellectual property, and it integrates directly into the Digital River network.
Software isn’t the only hot-selling item on e-commerce Web sites. The advent of affordable video production software has made home-produced video a reality. Musicians are finding that the Web is a great place for selling their music. Authors are discovering that the Web is an effective vehicle for distributing e-books.
While digital delivery for media is a viable option, many people prefer a non-digital product. Personally, I prefer a hard-copy book to an e-book, and I know I’m not alone. However, if you’re a small-time author, your chances of having a publisher pick up a book and print it are slim. Small-time authors are on the tip of the long tail because they have traditionally been undiscoverable.
Fortunately, there are e-commerce options for DVDs, CDs, and books. Lulu (www.lulu.com) is a company that specializes in all three. If you’ve written a book and want to sell it in hard copy, Lulu will take care of it for you by printing the book only when someone buys it. Lulu provides everything you need, including a storefront, and all of it is free of charge.
The two companies above are just examples of the kind of service that’s available to you on the Internet. Now is a great time to break into e-commerce because the options available to you are virtually endless.
Payment processing is quite likely the biggest roadblock to newcomers to e-commerce. All the options available are intimidating. The security aspect of credit cards also represents a considerable barrier to the inexperienced. The aura of confusion that surrounds payment processing is a double-edged sword. On one hand, many people are dissuaded from entering the world of e-commerce because of it. On the other hand, the confusion has accentuated the need for an easy solution, and many companies have delivered.
One of the easiest ways to accept payment is to use PayPal. A basic, free PayPal account allows you to accept payments from customers, but you won’t be able to accept credit cards with a basic account. If you’re interested in accepting credit cards (and you should be), you’ll want to upgrade your PayPal account to a business account.
A PayPal business account won’t cost you anything up-front, but PayPal will charge you a small transaction fee when you accept payments by credit card. It’s an affordable way to offer your customers a secure payment option.
Many banks offer merchant services to small businesses. Banks naturally specialize in handling money, and they often have robust services that they offer. In addition to that, a bank often brings name recognition with it, and that can provide you with a sense of legitimacy that is worth much more than you pay for the service.
Many banks offer additional services that set them apart from services such as PayPal. Those services can include offering gift cards for your business, detailed reporting, and a higher degree of fraud protection. Banks also will usually accept more forms of payment than other options.
If you choose this route, I encourage you to choose a bank that isn’t regional. By choosing a bank with branches in many regions, you offer your customers the widest range of services.
2CO (www.2checkout.com) specializes in offering payment services for credit card customers and online check customers. They’ve been around a long time and have historically been aggressive at changing their business to meet the ever-changing needs of e-commerce sellers.
2CO charges a one-time setup fee. You then enter your product(s) into their database and their system allows you to easily create the code necessary to add purchase links to your own site. When people click the link to buy your product, it takes them to 2CO’s payment processing via a secure connection.
There are many other payment options to explore. A Web search will turn up plenty of options. Most of them offer similar services. The important aspect of payment processing is that in almost all cases, you should let a third party handle it for you. The cost of setting up your own merchant accounts with credit card companies and configuring all the other requirements can be not only time-consuming, but also expensive.
After you decide what service you’ll use for e-commerce and for payment processing, you’ll need to design your Web site with features that make an e-commerce site more secure and one that can aid in your business.
An e-commerce Web site requires users to enter sensitive information that can range from an address and phone number to a credit card number. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure that you use secured pages whenever you are collecting information from your customers.
Most Web hosts provide SSL services, but they will usually require that you provide your own SSL certificate. An SSL certificate can be purchased from many different security companies such as DigiCert (www.digicert.com), Thawte (www.thawte.com), or VeriSign (www.verisign.com).
Note
Some hosting companies will provide you with an SSL certificate so that you don’t have to purchase one, but I strongly discourage you from going that route. SSL certificates are registered to specific domain names, and if you attempt to use a certificate on a domain other than the one to which it was registered, Web browsers will warn users of the difference when they visit your site. Many users won’t understand why they’re being warned and will immediately choose to not do business with you.
You won’t need to protect your entire site with an SSL certificate. Web browsers take longer to load pages that are under SSL, so what you’ll want to do is just protect the portion of your site that deals with exchanging sensitive information. You can set up that portion of your site as a subsite in Expression Web. You can then open it using SSL and publish to it using SSL as well. This is especially important if you are storing any customer data in a file (a text file, a database file, etc.) on the Web site. If you publish via SSL, all information that you are publishing is encrypted and protected.
→ | For information on how to publish a Web site using SSL, see “Publishing Content,” p. 48 (Chapter 3). |
A successful e-commerce site relies on consistent traffic. One of the best ways to get traffic is to advertise on other sites that are likely to be frequented by your audience. The best way to get other sites to link to your site is to offer a link exchange. Most Web site owners are more than happy to link to you if you’ll link to them in exchange.
Before you approach another Web site offering to exchange links, you’ll want to create some banner links for your Web site. There are several standard sizes for Web banners. Some of the more common sizes appear below.
Many graphic design applications allow you to easily create graphics that match these standard sizes. Another great option is to use The Logo Creator from Laughingbird Software. A free copy of The Logo Creator is included on the CD that accompanies this book.
Of course, you’ll also want to include room on your Web site for banners. When you design your site, make sure that you create an area for banner ads that will fit into the standard sizes mentioned previously. The most common banner is the full banner, but other banner sizes are becoming increasingly popular.
→ | The ASP.NET AdRotator control is a great solution for displaying banner ads. For more information on using the AdRotator control, see “Using Standard ASP.NET Controls”, p. 495 (Chapter 28). |
Keep in mind that many search engines (including Google) rank your Web site based upon how many other Web sites link to you. By building relationships with the owners of related Web sites, you can build your traffic and offer your visitors a better source of information.
After covering some of the basic requirements for opening an e-commerce storefront, you might be asking yourself if it’s worth the effort. If you’ve got something to sell, the answer is that it definitely is!
The Web has opened up a new realm of possibilities when it comes to business opportunities. Those who take advantage of those possibilities stand to profit considerably from the effort.
I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who had worked with a guy named Stewart some years back. Stewart announced one day that he was quitting his job to start up a new Web site with his wife that would let people share photographs on the Internet. No one took him seriously, but years later his Web site was purchased by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. (“Undisclosed amount” is code for “a ton of money”.) That Web site was Flickr.
There are many incredible opportunities available to those who are willing to take the plunge. You might not become a millionaire in the process, but one thing’s for sure, it will be an exciting ride!