How to Start an Internet Business
How to start an Internet business can be explained in a few sentences,
but it is the larger business considerations you need to think
about.
Ecommerce: The Inside Story
Everyone knows how to start an Internet business. Ecommerce guides
are two a penny — we noted over 120,000 on the web the last
time we looked — and paperback versions are piling up in
your local bookstore or library. Ecommerce is the next business
frontier, and many are still keen to join the land rush.
Or perhaps they were five years ago, before the dotcom bubble
burst and some common sense descended on the business community.
What's the post-boom view?
Ecommerce is here to stay, and will slowly change our shopping
habits. But it will not change long-standing business practices.
Companies who thought otherwise have closed, as have many software
houses developing applications that got ahead of any real demand.
Sobriety, careful thought and detailed planning are now the order
of the day.
Unfortunately, too many guides still focus on the small picture.
Build your site properly, and promote it like everyone else, and
you can expect to be successful. Not true. It's actually rather
difficult to sell goods and services through the impersonal medium
of the Internet, and what works for one company will not work
for another. The Internet marketplace is not a level playing field,
moreover — another myth we ought to mention — but one
tilted in favor of larger companies. Your local grocery store
is not very different from the store in a neighboring town, or
one at the other end of the country, and any half-decent business
consultant should be able to guess the turnover and profit margin
from a quick walk around. But ecommerce sites are very different
animals. You patronize your grocery store because it's local and
convenient, but all stores on the Internet — tens
of thousands of them — are only a click away from each other.
Your site has got to be pretty special to stand out from the crowd,
and that standing has to be real. Most ecommerce stores make their
money on repeat orders — necessarily when it costs upwards
of $40 to acquire a customer in the first place.
Why these cautionary remarks? To explain that we're offering
something rather different in our e-book. We go into all aspects
of ecommerce very carefully. Our website has free summaries on
many aspects of ecommerce, short business surveys and simple explanations
of technical matters. but our e-book goes much, much further.
We provide you with the resources to see for yourself, and test
your business models cheaply. It may be that your business is
not suited to ecommerce, or that you simply don't have the marketing
budget to break through the competition. But it may also be that
you're not seeing things properly, when our material will provide
new opportunities. At the very least, it will prevent you shelling
out thousands on what has been tried before, and shown to fail.
Why not try our ADVANCED GUIDE
TO ECOMMERCE, now in its seventeenth edition, for 30 days free of
charge?
An overview . . .
- The Internet's most detailed guide to ecommerce: 230,000 words
/ 850 pages in pdf format.
- 160 reference sheets summarizing a particular aspect, with
advice and resources as appropriate.
- Over 3,100 resource listings grouped under 260 headings: each
hand-picked on its merits.
- Fourteen comparison tables in key product areas.
- A proven approach to planning ecommerce.
- Practical advice on improving sales and conversion ratios.
- An extended guide to pay-per-click and sponsored listings.
- Use of business blogs, advised and ill-advised.
- Practical security aspects: keeping yourself safe.
- Testing sites and ideas at negligible cost.
- Some 100 case studies, both general and dotcom failures.
- Notes on ecommerce strategies and use of the resource listings.
- Tutorials on AdSense, ePublishing, eBay, RSS feeds, commercial
blogging, ecommerce for free, collective intelligence, seo revisited and using
ppc effectively.
- Ten up-to-date surveys of ecommerce prospects worldwide.
- Insider information based on Internet research and our own
studies.
- Strategies to test customer behaviour and improve sales.
- Comes as an interlinked webpage ebook (2 Mb), a sequential
webpage ebook (2 Mb) and as a pdf document (4.6 MB).
Click here for
a full contents listing of the current edition.
Our
$37.50 e-book comes with a 30-day, no-questions-asked guarantee.
If not fully satisfied, then simply email us for a prompt and
full refund. Material is continually being checked and extended,
and purchase includes free six-monthly updates.
The e-book comes as three documents: interlinked webpage compilation
for ready reference (2Mb) a sequential webpage compilation (2
Mb) and as a PDF document (4.6MB, 850 pages) for extended reading.
The content is the same in all documents, but while the PDF document
can be read on all platforms, the webpage compilations can only
be read on Windows platforms ( Windows 98x, Me, 2000, XP and Vista
machines). Your one-time payment gives you all three documents,
plus free updates.
Our January 2011 free update will include a tutorial on collaborative websites and an updated list of internet payment service providers.
Ordering is quick and safe. Simply pay through your account or credit Simply pay through your account or credit
card on Paypal's secure order page for immediate downloading.
(Click the 'Redirection to Site' button after payment processing
for download instructions.)
