Paul from Anaheim writes,

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zayd

Boom
May 29, 2007
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The internet is not the place to start a business. People think it is. They spend a lot of good money to find out the hard truth.

People think the internet is the big profit center. What they fail to remember is the dot com failures of the 90's.

Lots of people had all kinds of ideas about making an internet business. They attracted lots of venture capitalists with millions of dollars to put into the business.

But, many of them never were able to make a profit.

And, consider this. Back then, search engine listings were free.

Today it's a whole different story.

One of the biggest problems with retailing on the internet today is getting noticed by your customers. How in the hell is anyone going to find you? There are literally millions upon millions of retailers on the internet.

All of them competing for attention and customer orders.

How can potential customers even find you?

In order to even have a chance of being noticed, you need to do three things. First, buy search engine placement. You see those listing on the right side of google? Those are paid listings. They bought the location. Every time somebody clicks on one, it costs the company money.

Second, you have to advertise in the real world. Spread your web site name far and wide. Newspapers. Magazines. Maybe even a radio ad.

Then, you're still not done. You may have to actually buy traffic from an affiliate.

All this, just to get people to your site! They haven't even bought anything yet.

Now, you have to have a price that's rock bottom. Remember google. They have froogle now. It finds the lowest price on any item. If you're not the lowest, guess who gets the sale? Not you!

And, all this is in addition to your web site. Thinking of a shopping cart? That costs money. A merchant account? More money. Your hosting fees. Your extra fee for going over your bandwidth.

Fun, fun, fun.

Plus, let's not forget what happens when you actually get an order. There's shipping. Packing. Filling orders. Maintaining your stock. Paying taxes. Maintaining your site.

Add it all up. What's your net profit margin? If you're lucky, maybe 10%. That means you'll need to do $40,000 a month in sales to end up with $1000 a week.

Are you prepared to run $40,000 worth of stock through your home every month? That's hell of a lot of boxes you'll have to pack. Let's say the average order is $40. That's 1000 orders. Or 250 a week. Over 30 a day, every day. Can you fill an order every 15 minutes for 8 straight hours?

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me.

You see, people THINK the internet is a gold mine. But, when you actually sit down and try to plan a business, you find out just how much digging you'll need to do before you actually see any gold.

Selling an actual product is tough.

Even porn sites aren't the money-makers they once were. You pretty much have to give a lot of content away in order to attract a few measly bucks.

Anybody who can consistently make a buck on the internet has got to be one sharp cookie! That's for sure.

source

God, retards like this make me smile. It reminds me of how much fucking smarter I am than 99% of the people surfing the net.

Regards,
One Sharp Cookie
 


From the comments

yeah i agree there is no money in internet business. please people keep your money in your pocket and hold on to your dayjob because all the money in internet is already been made by the big boys.

I guess we're the big boys. :D
 
Heh... I came out of the eCommerce side of the biz, and I'll actually agree with this guy that it's essentially impossible to run a physical goods ecom site from home. But that's not what affiliates are all about - we're about being a marketing and promotional arm for others.

But yea, it takes a lot of risk to make a good living in the world of ecommerce. This guy kinda over dramatizes everything, but the nuts & bolts are pretty sound. Would you really want to push products out your door every day?
 
Oh of course e-commerce from home is shitty. But the problem is that this guy takes that and generally describes it as "the internet."
 
Actually he is right though. The internet is not a good place to start a business. I suspect if you compared the rate of business failure on the internet versus more traditional offerings, the internet rate would be substantially higher.
 
that because the cost to enter is minimal so almost anyone can do it from anywhere in the world but like anything most will fail from piss poor effort and follow through.


Actually he is right though. The internet is not a good place to start a business. I suspect if you compared the rate of business failure on the internet versus more traditional offerings, the internet rate would be substantially higher.
 
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