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

[Richard Bennett]

Hi,


> From: Cancilla Dominick <cancilla.d at buckconsultants.com>
>
>  >> I'm wondering, can we now finally admit that e-commerce doesn't
> work for > small businesses? << >
>  Why admit something that's not true? One of my clients -- a small
> company with only two employees -- has seen business almost double
> since they began selling products over the Web. They just had their
> first $100,000+ day.

Any chance of a URL? I have a large collection of broken, or bad e-commerce
sites bookmarked, it'd be nice to have a few examples of sites that DO sell.

----- Original Message -----
From: "aardvark" <roselli at earthlink.net>
>i somehow missed this thread, too...
>i've personally built a bunch of sites where the e-commerce portion
>was so successful it supplanted all mail, fax, and phone orders...
>a couple of them use the site (and its db) as their new order
>system for the company, instead of feeding the site's orders into
>their old system...
>each of those business is less than 30 people... or 20...

Again, if you have any URLs it'd be great, especially where you suspect the
businesses are actually making a profit.
It's easy to sell a lot (well...) if you sell cheap, (see Amazon) , but I
wouldn't automatically call that a success, there are so many e-commerce
companies that last just as long as their financing, and then fold.
The problem seems to be that it is hard to recoup your initial costs -
either you don't sell all that much, which means you never end up covering
all the server and website (and helpdesk, logistics, guarantee, refunds etc)
costs, or you do sell a lot, and you find yourself having to invest in a
more professional infrastructure, which suddenly costs much more than you
initially expected, when making your business-plan.

I originally asked this question, not meaning that *nobody* is making money,
but wondering if there were any publicly available studies on companies that
DO make money (and a profit) by e-commerce.
And also because it struck me how many e-commerce sites are simply broken
(database or script errors, dead links etc).

for instance, if it took Amazon 5 years to book a profit (they say "net
profit" but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of their financing has been
spread over a lot more than 5 years)  can we feel comfortable recommending
our local bookstore to build an e-commerce site? will they ever make a
profit?

From: "Meredith Tupper" <meredith at pintsize.com>
>+1 on this; I missed the thread and I definitely agree that small
>business e-commerce is our bread and butter.
Who's bread and butter? the businesses (profit?), or the designers? (cost)

>I have found that addinge-commerce to a site can be the most tangible
measure of its value for
>the site owner, even the CCNow/PayPal/Cafe Press people.
It's PayPal that got me thinking about this in the first place, when I'm
browsing, and I happen to be on a site that sells something, I often go
through the motions of ordering something, to see how their cart works, if
they use paypal you can see how many people ordered from that company
before - these numbers are often very low, rarely above 100. you can also
see how many years they have been online.

<but I can recall a few creative uses of e-commerce, like the
<Fightin' Whities t-shirt: http://www.cafepress.com/fightinwhite/.
Ok, this is a nice clean site, although as I went through the motions it
turns out I *need* to have a 10 digit telephone number if I want to buy a
T-shirt. People without a phone number, or a short phone number, can't buy a
T-shirt.

Cheers, Richard.