Are you scared of traffic?
A couple of years ago I designed a website that sold computer games online. The site was called GameZite and I spent about four months developing the site. At the time I was a contract developer so I could devote this time to the project. Anyhow it was my first real web project and took me a while to set up, but at the end I was quite rightly proud of my solution. I put my site live and the problems started.
I didn’t really have any capital to buy stock, and I didn’t have the traffic to buy loads of stock because I wasn’t confident I was going to get the traffic to sell it. So some orders started to trickle in, but as I wasn’t holding stock I was having to order from the suppliers piecemeal. That meant that the end-customer was having to wait for their games to get despatched. I found that waiting customers made unhappy customers. I got to the point where I didn’t really want to turn the computer on. I mean, I wanted traffic (but lots of it). The trickle of visitors was causing more problems than having none at all.
The other problem was that the margins on games weren’t great and online their was shed-loads of competition. I guess I just didn’t think the whole thing through.
So now I’m only prepared to deal with informational or service based websites. That way you don’t have to worry about the supply of “physical” goods and startup costs are minimal.
You live and learn as they say.
notsorich @ March 24, 2006