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| Oct 26, 2006 3:29 pm |
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re: What type of online services are you looking for ? |
Kurt Schweitzer
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I think you will do better by asking "What are you trying to accomplish online?"
I interpret the question you asked as "What technology are you looking for?" Someone who can answer that question is already 80% of the way to having the answer, and will be looking for existing products that meet their needs.
That doesn't leave much room for someone who is trying to develop new applications.
You mention "an e-commerce storefront". To get to the point of looking for one, the business owner has to go through the process of determining that his products can be sold online, that he can afford the costs of packing and shipping, that handling returns won't be a problem, that his prices can be competitive on the Internet, that he has a merchant account in place to process credit card payments, that he can afford the time and effort to photograph his products and write up effective online sales pitches for them, and that he is able to manage the website so that it always reflects current price and availability of his products. He also feels that he knows enough about online advertising that his website will generate profits rather than simply sucking up money, and he has procedures in place to measure the effectiveness of his online advertising.
THEN they start looking for specific software or services to meet their needs.
If you can help the small business owner go through all of the steps necessary to "sell my products on the Internet" they'll gladly buy whatever piece of software you recommend to complete the implementation. After all, they don't care about the software as long as it does the job.
Kurt Schweitzer
P.S. I have the following: osCommerce for "e-commerce storefront", SugarCRM for "customer relationship management", WordPress for "blogging", PostNuke for "content management", Gallery for "image management", PayPal for "merchant account processing". Most of these are provided (free) by my hosting service, others are open source software that is also free, or free/low cost services. Developing software is a tough field to make any money in!Private Reply to Kurt Schweitzer (new win) |
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