Expensive Surprises!
Chris Gunn
Recently I've been in contact with dozens of folks who thought they would be
able to quickly set up a web store and earn a great living. You'll see
claims that look like:
"Our Ecommerce Catalog is guaranteed to earn you $10,000 per month within
the next 6 months! If it doesn't, we will give you the catalog for free!"
Sounds Great! Right?
Then you see: "an initial investment of only $400 and not the normal $5,000
development fees.", "...and only $50 a month." You are just getting started
so you don't have much to compare it to.
Three or four months after putting up the money they want to allow you to
use their software to create your own web site (which costs them virtually
nothing) you are still only getting a few hits per day. Then you see some
spam claiming to get you thousands of hits a day for $300.00. Maybe that's
the answer?
So you pay the $300.00 and your hits take a giant leap up to maybe a hundred
a day. However, you don't know where they come from and you still are not
selling enough to cover the monthly hosting fees.
The six month mark comes around and you aren't making anything near that
$10,000 promise. Giving you the catalog for free doesn't seem worth the
having spent more money than your web site has earned any more. Some will
have talked you into signing a one-year contract, that they claim you can't
break. That's also not true.
Somewhere along the line you find commercial web designers that would have
set up your site for $500 instead of that $5,000 claim. You find better
quality hosting at a lower monthly cost. Then you find drop ship catalogs
you can use on your site for free.
Where did you get sabatoged? The main problem:
1. The search engines have millions of web pages indexed that have the same
keywords as yours.
2. It takes up to six months to get listed on the top search engines, but
if folks don't know your company name, they still can't find you.
3. The Internet was great three to five years ago. Now it's like your web
store is a little room way up inside this huge thousand story building.
You feel like www stands for "Wild Wild West" and you've been talked into
joining a gold rush that's a pot of pennies at the end of a rainbow.
It's really not as hostile as all this may sound. With good advice and help
to overcome the obstacles, lot's of patience, and many hours of work
building up your client base, a web store can be a profitable enterprise.
Take advantage of the biz.ecommerce, biz.marketplace.discussion, and
biz.marketplace.web-design newsgroups. You'll find lot's of folks there
that know the ropes and willing to answer your questions.
Thanks, Chris www.bizynet.com www.bizycart.com
BIZynet Coordinator cg...@bizynet.com
Moderator of biz.general, biz.marketplace.discussion, biz.ecommerce,
biz.marketplace.web-design, biz.marketplace.international & others