Online Rules of Successful Companies: The Fool-Proof Guide to Building Profits, The

Chapter Three. Profitable Ecommerce

Let's start by defining ecommerce as “selling goods or services directly over the Internet that are delivered individually to each customer.” This definition is important, because there are many businesses that cannot benefit directly from ecommerce and would do better using the Internet as a purely promotional medium and making their actual sales offline, either by phone or in person.

Used cars are an example of products that should not be sold (or bought) online. New, factory-built cars of a given make, model, and color may be essentially identical to one another, but each used car is an individual item, with its potential value determined almost as much by the way it was treated by previous owners as by the ...