[thelist] does anybody make any money with e-commerce?

[the head lemur]

I am a pixel mechanic and build websites for a living. I make money. It is
e-commerce.

E-commerce is the same 'offer and acceptance' method of sales that has been
used since the beginning of time. The village square to the shopping mall,
to the computer screen.

Pixels and the internet merely increase the potential reach of the seller.
The internet increases the choices for the buyer.


People are making money with the internet everyday. The mechanism for
counting and reporting these sales are flawed, for a number of reasons.

In mid 1998 sites and companies who reported internet sales decided to count
adult sites in calculating online sales. This created an immediate buzz and
fueled the dotcom madness which as we watched crashed and burned in 2000.

The majority of companies are privately owned, and outside of their tax
returns which in most cases are not made available to the public, have no
requirements to make available their sales figures online or off.

Those companies who are public, have different methods of accounting which
may or may not breakout internet sales as a separate line item and therefor
countable.

The types of products and services available, the terms and conditions of
sales and the desire of the buyers all create a fluid situation that is not
quantifiable in a system  be able to say that this is how much business is
being transacted.

The poster child for e-commerce is Amazon.com, who is a seller of books,
records, videos and now some consumer electronics. They are successful as
their primary products, books, music and video, are all familiar in format
and packaging. They leverage this by price, selection and service.

They have taken years to make a profit, as the infrastructure to provide the
service from website to doorstep needed to be created from the ground up.
>From software, to computers, to warehouses, to packaging to delivery.

They also carry a huge selection.

Ebay is the other success story from the buyer side as the selection her is
large as well. they make their money as facilitators and carry no inventory.



I have created a number of sites that are doing extremely well, accounting
for between 35-60% of total sales. These companies are in the 500,000 to 2
million dollar a year in sales category. These sites rely on request forms
and email.
Closing the sale is done with phone and fax, rather than shopping carts,
merchant services or third party clearancing systems.

I wrote an article on this type of ecommerce a couple of years ago.
The Money Page
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/money/money1.html

As a pixel mechanic, your job is to help your client to increase their
business exposure. But that is all you can and should do.

It is up to the client to close the sale.

the head lemur
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