Mar
2
Building E-Commerce Websites
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Building an e-commerce site is a challenging process. Certainly there are some technical challenges, but more critical are the challenges related to the customer’s expectations. Additionally, how a company manages their offline business practices has a direct impact on how their online system will function. Finally, there are quite a few details that need to be explained and discussed when building an e-commerce site. E-commerce sites tend to have a much broader range of scope and complexity then other kinds of sites. This month’s newsletter will describe various aspects to e-commerce sites and identify the particular aspects that tend to complicate e-commerce projects.
Heightened Expectations
Prior to the “dot-com” crash of 2000, the marketplace was filled with businesses that wanted to sell online. Many ill-conceived business plans were enabled by venture capital with the primary motivation of getting their companies to an I.P.O. Perhaps the most detrimental result of all that hype was that genuine businesses with solid products and markets got caught up in the rush and made many costly mistakes (paid out of their own earnings, not from venture capital). After the bubble burst, e-commerce companies closed their doors. At that time companies that invested their own money realized that the online market wasn’t as easily grabbed as they’d hoped. Additionally, the expensive and complex e-commerce systems that they hastily built, trying to keep up with the “dot-coms,” were extremely buggy and undependable. Many companies were seriously hurt and their expectations were entirely unmet.