By Carol Wadell
When Jeff Bezos was looking for the perfect product to sell with a web site, he chose books. His web site turned out to be the perfect low-cost way to sell lots and lots of books.
Bezos, founder of online book giant Amazon.com, says it would take a building the size of several football fields to house Amazon's four million books. "Printing the catalog would be as big as a collection of phone books," he muses.
Clearly, web site technology gives Amazon.com the ability to present their huge book collection in a way no regular book store or catalog operation can match. Their web site catalog is cheap, fast and easy to use.
If you spend lots of your marketing budget on printing, mailing and catalogs, think about moving your marketing chores to the Internet. Smart retailers and mail-order firms are augmenting or replacing their traditional printed materials with inexpensive web pages. If your business relies on mailers, you can reduce expensive postage and printing costs by adding your own low-cost web site. Some savvy mail-order businesses are saving money by mailing a postcard to customers notifying them of their latest offerings available in full detail, including pictures, on the company web site.
Web sites are better and cheaper than ever. Full-featured web site space is available from thousands of hosting services. Sohoweb.net offers an unlimited site with autoresponders and other bells and whistles for under $20 per month.
Until fairly recently, you had three choices for creating your own web site: learn to program in HTML, hire a web designer/programmer to design and program your site or learn to use one of the commercial programs, like Microsoft's Frontpage.
The latest generation of software tools make it even easier to sell your products on the web. One example is eShowcase, which allows anyone to quickly create a professional online "catalog" complete with photos and descriptions. The ability to create your own online catalog in just minutes opens up tremendous possibilities for businesses like auto dealerships (who sell up to 20 percent of their autos from the Internet), art galleries, antique stores, jewelers, pet stores and any business that can show products with descriptions and photos.
Whatever method you use to create your site, remember that a lot of your customers are surfing the Net with older modems on slower phone lines. Put too many slow-loading graphics on your site and you'll find customers clicking away in frustration. When necessary, use a graphics-reducing program (like the one at gifwizard.com) to keep your photos fast loading.
Carol Wadell offers and installs the new eShowcase Product Listing software for your web site. It's a full-featured tool ideal for instantly creating sites for companies with a constantly changing product base. You can see a demo of eShowcase at www.WorkshopInc.com/eshowcase.htm
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