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Rule 4: The technology is complicated |
Offers from the
likes of Yahoo with its store-building software may lead you to believe it's
rather simple to start an Internet venture. Home-page builders, contribute to
the perception. But to build a Web-site that people will come back to, you'll
have to maintain-and update it on a daily basis. As a software project, a Web
business contains many disparate elements, all of which must vibe seamlessly
for customers, employees, partners, advertisers and warehouse operators.
Your site must run not only on your own quirky PC but also
on those of people around the world -- cranky Windows machines with 486
processors, zippy i-books, Unix boxes. Chat rooms and discussion areas add
living, breathing elements to your business, with your customers actually
changing the content of your site. All of this must be scalable -- capable of
handling not just 50 or 100 simultaneous viewers to your site but thousands.
If your business is a retail venture, the supply-side
mechanics are important. The site must process orders, handle customer
relations, and connect to inventory-tracking systems. Becoming an online
retailer with a snappy server and an online store is not enough. Servicing a
diverse set of consumers, within the promised time-frame, requires planning
and investment in logistics. It does not help at all if the cost of acquiring
customers is very high while per customer revenues are very low.
Consider the seemingly simple "buy" button. Engineers work
on that button. So do marketers, designers, even people with titles you never
knew existed, like "information architects," who determine much of the
structure of a site. A buy button needs to
retrieve pricing and product information from a database. It needs to
interact with an online shopping cart. Perhaps a user was directed to your
site from an advertisement offering a discount; the buy button needs to
understand that, then apply the discount.
People go on-line to solve a problem! Your job is not to
annoy them with endless flashing buttons that say ‘‘Buy Now!'' Rarely do
people just buy a product without considering how the product or service will
solve the problem that initially caused them to start looking in the first
place. The larger the perceived risk the greater the need to get answers to
their questions. Either answer the questions before they ask them or set up a
very easy, fast customer service model.
