Overview
Ask any web surfer to name Internet retailing successes and the response will inevitably include Amazon.com, CDnow, Virtual Vineyards, or other widely known web storefronts. In fact, given these relentless references, one might think there are only a handful of online retailers making money. What is true is that there are only a handful of widely publicized successess. Buried in the Net are retailing sites quietly racking up impressive sales without headlines. This book tells the story of the quiet entrepreneurs who are making moeny, anywhere from six figure grosses to multi-millions. What makes these stories so compelling is that while they share a common denominator of genuine Internet success, not one took the same route on the Information Superhighway...all opted instead for roads less traveled.Editorials
Gregory V. Wilson
E-Business for Fun and Profit
Jaclyn Easton's StrikingItRich.com is not about defusing hype, but rather about substantiating it. Easton, a columnist and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, has profiled 23 small web-based businesses that have done well. Her choices range from "The Knot", a one-stop shop for modern weddings, to home improvement sites like "Ask The Builder," and community-oriented sites such as "KoreaLink."
Each profile is full of hard information: costs, revenues, success (and failure) rates for different kinds of web-based advertising, and so on. Violating one stereotype, the average age of the entrepreneurs Easton interviewed is 40. Violating another, their sites tend to make little or no use of Java, frames, and other high-tech eye candy. Instead, the only universal rule seems to be that customer service matters even more on-line than it does in the real world. As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, says in the book's introduction, "If you make one customer unhappy, he won't tell five friends--he'll tell 5,000 on newsgroups."
StrikingItRich.com does have two failings, however. One is the disjointed nature of Easton's prose, which sometimes reads like clippings that have been sorted by topic and then concatenated. The second is that she dismisses "adult content" (the sex industry's preferred description for its on-line offerings). In her introduction, Easton says:
"The unspoken truth about Internet commerce is that the true trailblazers are the sex site proprietors...They were the first to offer real-time credit-card approvals, use streaming video and audio on demand, find foolproof subscription systems, and eliminate credit-card fraud. Despite their value to us as business people, they don't qualify for profiling. Their subject matter has been in demand since the world began, making their product an easy sell in any environment and hence not applicable to mainstream business."
Well, no. There may be a high demand for dirty pictures, but there is also an enormous amount of material available for free on the Internet. Getting people to pay, and pay enough to make a profit, is a tremendous challenge. The porn industry's successes and failures therefore do have a lot to teach other kinds of businesses. The Economist and other reputable journals have not shied away from looking at this side of e-commerce, and it is a shame that Easton was too squeamish to do so.
Anyone who is already doing business on-line, or thinking about it, should at least browse through StrikingItRich.com. It contains a wealth of ideas and practical advice, and will undoubtedly provide a lot of grist for the business seminar mill.
— Electronic Review of Computer Books