There are many myths about the Internet concerning where it is going and who controls it. We will only cover those relating to selling online and leave the rest to the conspiracy theorists.
“Selling on the net is easy”
It is difficult to sell anything on the net. More than one million new Web sites are posted every week and each of them is fighting to be found. That’s the first hurdle: to be found you must use net marketing. At the same time you have to build trust, add huge value and reduce risks for your prospects to buy, all within the first three seconds.
“You can sell anything on the net”
Unfortunately, most products we look at are not a good fit for selling on the net. There are many reasons why some products don’t sell. We put each product we see through a 100-point net product test to find out if it will be a net winner. Even after product testing, building a great Web site, market research and marketing campaigns some products still fail to sell in large quantities. There is no guarantee a product will sell, so what must be applied are the tried and tested strategies that increase the possibilities for sales.
“All you have to do is have a Web site”
The Internet is like a TV with more than 1000,000,000 (trillion) channels. Having your Web site built by a sales professional is your first and most critical step. But without reliable ongoing marketing strategies nobody will find it.
“The internet is not safe”
The internet is as safe as the person using it. If you don’t take precautions, such as using up-to-date anti-virus software, having a firewall and never responding to emails asking for your bank details, it is generally okay. However, clever Internet scammers can slip under your guard, so it’s always wise to do a Google searches and read up on the latest scams.
“Everything you read on the Internet is true”
The Internet has revolutionized the publishing and media industries. Anyone with an Internet connection can instantly share his or her thoughts and opinions with a worldwide audience. The result, according to Google, is that there are well over a trillion unique Web pages [source: Alpert].
Because anyone can publish a Web site, it is almost impossible to be sure where the information you reading came from, except in the case of .gov and .edu, which should indicate a credible resource.
“The Internet will make you rich”
If you believe the “I make $50,000 a day online!” advertisements and spam e-mails touting the “Millionaire’s Secrets to E-Trading,” then you view the Internet as one big gold mine just waiting for a shovel. Or maybe you’d be impressed if someone said there is a gorgeous suspension bridge in Brooklyn they could sell to you.
It’s true that a few visionary and lucky entrepreneurs cashed in big when venture capitalists and large brick-and-mortar companies funneled billions into their fledgling tech startups during the dot-com boom years. Huge flops such as Webvan, eToys and Pets.com made news, but the memory of these crashes has faded with time.
From a business perspective, it’s still tempting to regard the Internet as a magic bullet for increasing the sales of any existing product or service. After all, if millions of people are online, then you must have a huge customer base. Then again, you may not.
Effective online marketing is tricky. It requires savvy search engine optimization, complicated online advertising models and sometimes even expensive offline commercials. And even if you can convince millions of people to visit your site, there’s no guarantee they’re going to buy [source: Borrego].
“My business is local so I don’t need a Web site”
There’s no such thing as a local business anymore: former local businesses such as banks, realtors and even dry cleaners have all gone virtual.
“This internet thing is going to be a revolution”
The revolution has happened. Worldwide, more than two billion people use the internet every day. The person who believes it will be okay to “worry about the internet later” is completely wrong.
“The Yellow Pages is all I need”
At least half your new customers are going online to find you, so without a Web site you are automatically shutting them out. In addition, you can’t track Yellow Pages advertising the way you can online advertising.
“The Web levels the playing field”
AKA: Startups Can Instantly Compete On The Same Footing As Long-Established Companies.
This is a wonderful dream that suggests anyone can enter any E-commerce market and compete on an even playing field. But it would be extremely difficult to compete head to head with Dell, ebay, Amazon or any established brand. This means you must be much smarter, use creative marketing strategies and only sell products that don’t compete directly with a long established and trusted market leader.
“It means the end of mass marketing”
Once again, the theory is simple enough: The Web is the first communications channel that enables cost-effective one-to-one marketing on a massive scale. Marketing to a “segment of one” has long been the goal of database marketing, data mining, and telemarketing, but Web technology enables marketing of unprecedented exactitude and low cost.
Mass marketing is also a necessity for the captains of online industry. Dell isn’t the largest online PC seller only because of execution; it also heavily markets its direct-selling approach, on prime-time TV and elsewhere.
“In theory, an Internet-only computer company should have surpassed Dell by now,” says US Web’s Laube. “But there is no ‘PCs.com,’ at least not one that’s been very successful. In E-commerce, branding and mass marketing are more important than ever.”
Ultimately, that’s just common sense, at least for those who understand there’s more to E-commerce than click-throughs.
