[thelist] advertising ON an e-commerce site

[Miriam Frost]

This was originally sent as html (whoops) so sorry if it's duplicated.

Help, please, if you can.

My boss (who makes money off of his personal site with ads) thinks it's a
fantastic idea to sell banner advertising on our company e-commerce site.  I
do not see the sense in taking anyone off of our site by selling ads either
through our marketing department of some devil company like DoubleClick.
Every single reputable e-commerce site that I have ever seen does NOT do
this.  I have made my arguements against this (as has the webmaster) but to
no avail -- because it works for him, it will work for us, right?

We have over $1mil annual sales, and want to get to two -- would what we'd
make from advertising pay for
a)the effort and
b) be anything more than a drop in the bucket
c) be worth damage to the user experience and trust
d) make up for what we'd lose in sales by taking people out of the store??

 Does anyone have any hard data about advertising ON e-commerce sites, in
terms of who does this, their revenues, etc.?  They listen to hard numbers
here but not reason.  I may have to make some up.  Ugh!

Thanks in advance.
Miriam