No More Funny Business
The first time Rob Snell tried to put his company on the Internet, he failed.
Snell had founded Gun Dog Comics while he was a college student, in 1988. By 1995 the half-million-dollar business had four locations in and around Starkville, Miss., but sales had begun to slump. Snell knew he had to find a market beyond that of the comic-book aficionados of Mississippi State University. He thought he might find that market on the Web.
The fulfillment part of electronic commerce didn't faze Snell in the least. After years of helping out at his parents' pet-supply company, he understood mail order. To further aid matters, he was already a credit-card merchant, and he didn't have some elaborate database that he'd have to tie into an electronic front end. Snell felt that all he needed was a simple site where customers could select items from his inventory and drop them into a shopping cart. The shopping cart, in turn, would generate an E-mail message telling him how much to charge the customer and where to ship the merchandise. "I just needed someone to handle the Internet side of the street," he says. "I was prepared to take care of everything else."
Still, before calling vendors Snell decided to embark on a little self-education tour. Typing such phrases as "E-commerce," "mail order," and "small business on the Internet" into various search engines, he began by reading articles and general advice about fielding commercial sites. He then visited successful retailers like Amazon.com and checked out other mail-order businesses and hobbyist/collectibles sites. On several occasions he even bought something on-line in order to run a site's order-taking process through its paces.
The results were not impressive. "I was blown away," Snell says. "Fifty percent of the orders I placed were either incomplete or I never got them. There was no E-mail confirmation. No 'Thank you for your order.' Nothing." Moreover, Snell often found placing an order to be too cumbersome, with too many clicks required to find the shopping cart.
Nor was Snell bowled over by the Web-design firms he found as a result of his research. Most didn't offer commerce services at all or only offered services that were way out of his ballpark in terms of technological sophistication and cost. Then one day a sales pitch caught his eye. "Seven days to get your business on the Internet," promised the Ohio-based ISP. The deal: for $100 a month, the vendor would host as many pages as Snell needed to list his inventory (100 items to start), provide a shopping cart for secure ordering, and even throw in some extras like bulletin boards and chat rooms. All Snell had to do was program the pages. "I figured, how hard could it be?" says Snell, a graphic designer by training. "I fell for it hook, line, and sinker."
Snell signed up with the ISP in March 1997. Following the company's instructions--including visiting recommended HTML tutorial sites where he learned to build simple Web pages--he had a site up on its server by July. Unfortunately, no one could buy anything from it. Snell says he followed to the letter the ISP's instructions for setting up the shopping cart--and did so over and over--but the thing just wouldn't work. And when Snell tried to pay the ISP for a few hours of consulting, the company said it was too busy. "Their version of 24-hour tech support was that when you sent them an E-mail, it took them 24 hours to get back to you," says Snell, and he was made to feel like a pest every time he called. (The ISP has since gone out of business.)
Snell had a live site, but without on-line order taking it was useless. Rather than promote it, he decided to cut his losses ($500 for five months of hosting) and go looking for a shopping cart that would be easy to set up and to use.
It was about this time that Snell's brother and business partner, Steve, heard about Viaweb (now Yahoo!Store), a site on which businesses can build storefronts using simple templates. Snell signed up for a free trial. Wanting to simplify things as much as possible, he decided to experiment with the inventory from his parents' pet-supply company, which was much simpler than his own. A tutorial walked him through the process. Quickly, he learned how to list items, upload images, and make changes to descriptions and prices. Though he was no stranger to HTML, Snell was relieved to find out that he didn't have to program anything. And most important, the shopping cart worked. Within half an hour--long before the site was complete--Snell successfully placed a test order.
After three days spent mostly at the keyboard, Snell had his mock site: a 50-item catalog, some company information, and a working shopping cart. The ordering mechanism was fairly simple: when people bought items, Snell would receive E-mail or fax alerts including everything but the credit-card information. (To obtain that, he would have had to log in to Viaweb's secure server.) It looked good, but Snell--once bitten--wasn't quite ready to commit. He still had 10 days before his free trial expired, so he decided to examine other options.
The most obvious were on-line malls. Like Viaweb, these sites help merchants create simple storefronts, but most also insist on handling credit-card transactions and want commissions on sales. Snell recalls one mall that didn't even provide individual storefronts but rather mixed together everyone's merchandise like some strange electronic department store. In addition, malls often insist that their tenants make do with URLs that are extensions of the malls' own domain names (www.megamallyourstore). Snell wanted his own domain name, something Viaweb would let him have.
Also in its favor, Viaweb had pages that were simple but looked professional. Snell didn't think that any of the malls he visited had done a better job. Furthermore, several of the mall sites were a bear to navigate. "If it took more than three clicks to order, I didn't want it," he says.
So it was back to Viaweb, where Snell's first monthly payment--$100--bought him enough space to list 50 items. He spent the rest of the summer creating his own site, loading product information and images, customizing pages with Viaweb's tools, and testing the ordering process over and over. His Gun Dog Comics site went live in September 1997, at first under an extension of Viaweb's URL. A few months later, in an attempt to give the site an identity separate from that of his physical store, Snell registered it under the domain name bigbluecomics.com.
Within three weeks Big Blue Comics had its first order--from Singapore. Today the catalog lists up to 1,000 items, and on-line orders constitute 25% to 30% of revenues. Last October, Snell closed one of his retail stores because the Web site was proving more profitable--in part because it had almost no overhead. "E-commerce is going to save the world," Snell says. "And I'm going to be right there when it happens."
Mie-Yun Lee is the editorial director and founder of BuyersZone, an Internet-buying service that features expert purchasing advice and tools for small and midsize businesses. You can use its tools to explore the best ways to get your company on-line at www.buyerszone.com/website/incsearch.html. Sandra Boncek contributed to this article.
