Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. Stalking the Wild Dollar: Internet Commerce

In This Chapter

Finding your niche Delivering the goods Designing for orders

More pure bull hockey is floating around about Internet commerce than about practically any other topic in the world. If you haven’t found thousands of e-commerce Web sites promising you the moon — and a moon made of gold and platinum at that — you aren’t looking.

According to these self-proclaimed gurus of e-commerce, all you need to do is put up a Web page — not even a site, just a page — and the money comes rolling in. You can vacation in Acapulco this weekend and sun yourself on the Riviera by Monday. The secret to this success? Well, of course, they can’t just tell you what it is. That kind of information is worth some real money, you know.

This “get-rich-quick-over-the-Internet” scheme reminds me of an ad that used to run in the backs of cheap magazines many, many years ago. For 25¢, the ad promised, you could discover how to make a fortune fast. After you sent in your quarter, you got back a pamphlet that, boiled down to its basics, told you to put an ad in a magazine asking people to send you a quarter. Today’s get-rich-quick schemes are no more solid than that one, even if they’re draped in the latest finery of high technology.

So is there any truth at all to the glowing promise of Internet commerce? Yes, there is. The Internet represents the greatest market that’s ever existed, and the opportunity is very real. You can make a fortune in ...