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Almost Free E-commerce

 

At this early stage, says Zona Research's Jack Staff, E-commerce service providers are concentrating on attracting a solid customer base of small businesses, the Internet-commerce mother lode. Next the providers plan to roll out additional premium services, like more aggressive search-engine indexing and custom banner ads. Meanwhile, any business, from a treadmill tinkerer to a music maker, can go ahead and add that e to its commerce.

Best of Breed

Even in a category as new as E-commerce service providers, the cream has already started to rise to the top. Researchers at Cahners In-Stat Group, in San Jose, Calif., recently evaluated and ranked 15 of the new providers. "The small-business market used to be a neglected segment," says industry analyst Leslie Shattuck, who coauthored the report. "Now small businesses are beginning to see wide-open opportunities for getting on the Net. With all these companies trying to serve them, they don't have to step out into a black hole." Here are In-Stat Group's top nine companies that provide mass-customization services. The evaluators based their ranking on the quality of each company's site setup, back-office-management capabilities, variety of marketing services, and value-added services.

Freemerchant.com
OhGolly.com
eCongo.com
SmartAge.com
Bigstep.com
Hostway.com
bCentral.com
Zanova.com
Convey.com

Source: eBusiness service provider ranking:
Small Business Q1 2000, Cahners In-Stat Group

Free-for-all?

Don't get carried away with elaborate fantasies of free E-commerce. "The bottom line is, you're going to pay for it one way or the other," says Ken Burke, CEO of Multimedia Live, a Web-development company in Petaluma, Calif., that serves big-name clients like eBay and General Motors. Burke has conducted hundreds of E-commerce seminars for small businesses. He suggests that companies ask the following important questions before signing up with a service provider -- "free" or otherwise.

  • Do you have toll-free, 24-hour tech support?
  • Can I register my own domain name?
  • Can I take my domain name with me when I move on?
  • Will you register my site with multiple search engines?
  • Will you put banner ads on my site?
  • Will I have any control over those banner ads?
  • How many templates do you have?
  • How often can I make changes to my site?
  • Is there a limit to how big the site can be?
  • Do you collect transaction fees? What's your cut?
  • Will you charge me additional fees if I add more items to my catalog?
  • Will credit-card orders be secure on my site?
  • How will I retrieve orders?
  • Do you handle tax and shipping?
  • Do you handle order fulfillment?

Under Construction

In journalism school I took a course called "Multimedia Publishing," in which I learned clunky programs for building Web sites. That was three years ago, and since then my father-in-law, Jim Maxwell, has been asking me to build a site for his heavy-construction business, Hub Foundation Co., in Harvard, Mass. Various distractions (such as attempting to make a living as a journalist) forced me to keep putting him off. Creating a Web site would take too long, I told him. It would probably be ugly, and I wouldn't know how to mount it on the "real" Web, as opposed to a university server. Then I heard about Homestead.com.

Getting over the guilt: Inc. writer turned Web designer finally comes through on her promise.

I tuned my browser to Homestead's very flexible design page, typed in some text, dragged and dropped some clip art, and in five minutes Hub Foundation had a working home on the Web. For a few more hours that evening at Jim's home computer, we fine-tuned it. On it contractors can read about Hub's projects and fill out forms to request bids for future work. They can E-mail Jim for more information. I even pasted on a hit counter, which Jim had always wanted.

The Homestead site editor takes a couple minutes to download, and saving changes to a page takes a while. But when I E-mailed Homestead about a linking problem I was having, a tech-support person responded with a solution within half a day.

Although many sites don't charge more than the standard $70 to register a domain name for two years, Homestead charged Jim $139.95 for the name www.hubfoundation.com. Homestead also collects a transaction fee from merchants selling products. CEO Justin Kitch says the company, which hosts personal sites as well, plans to offer more services, like E-mail marketing, to small businesses in the future. Right now the important thing is that Jim finally has a site to work with. And I feel no Hub-related guilt for the first time in years. --Jill Hecht Maxwell

For more on the gear you really need to start and grow your small business, see our CEO's Start-Up Toolkit.

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