Business Plans Kit For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. Planning in an Online World

In This Chapter

• Looking at lessons from the recent past

• Building an e-commerce business model

• Adding e-business to your brick-and-mortar establishment

When the first edition of this book came out in 2001, lessons from the 2000 dot-com crash were works in progress. Hundreds of Internet-based businesses had folded, 100,000 jobs had evaporated, and the economy was still quaking. Fast forward to today, and the landscape is completely transformed. Google has become one of the most successful companies in history. Amazon has become one of the world's biggest retailers. The music distribution business is largely conducted on the Web. The newspaper business is rapidly becoming an online enterprise.

Yet plenty of uncertainty remains. The publishing industry is still trying to make sense of the risks and benefits of online delivery. Social networking sites have drawn millions of people, but many are still trying to figure out how to make a buck.

What does the increasing role of the Internet mean for your business? That's the $64,000 question. Or potentially the $64 million question for companies that get the answer right. The only thing that anyone can say about the Internet with any certainty is that it's changing, and changing fast. The future will look very different from the present.

How do you conduct business planning in such an environment? Good question. The pace of change brought about by technological innovation — and especially by the transformations ...