Tag Archives: FairMarket Inc.

About 4859 days ago E-Commerce

Traffic Will Make You Rich: The Word from the Experts

Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich REALITY CHECK: Selling well makes you rich. Traffic only provides eyeballs Cramer: Revenues are what will define things in the end, but people live and die by the Media Metrix site-traffic reports. Wall Street is obsessed with them. I swear to God, if you want to make big money in the stock market, go to Springfield High outside Philadelphia. Get a bunch of kids and say, “Surf this site all day long, and I’ll give you 20 Gs.” You’ll generate a huge amount of page views, which is what wins in the market today. Johnson: Sites like Blue Mountain Arts’ E-greeting-card site succeed because they provide something that attracts people, and in the Internet world that’s a useful model. It may make business-school people scratch their heads, but traffic to a portal gets a person to hit some other channel buttons and use other content. Morgan: A lot of companies, like Blue Mountain Arts, are specifically aggregating an audience, and they’ll figure out what to do with it later. The question is whether an audience used to doing things for free will ever pay for them. Randall: There is a common belief that you should basically spend an infinite amount of money to promote your site. What you’re starting to see is that at the end of the day, you have to have a real business model. Rich: Bottom line: you’ve got to have users and customers. Driving visitors to a site is not a guarantee for a viable business. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

About 4859 days ago E-Commerce

Razzle-Dazzle Makes Web Sites Great: The Word from the Experts

Myth 4: Razzle-Dazzle Makes Web Sites Great REALITY CHECK: Bells and whistles are fun but not always functional Cramer: The look and feel of a site is meaningless. What matters is speed. People want to get in and get out. Until they get technology so that pictures and graphics don’t delay load time, all pictures should be banned. Eisenhardt: Fancy graphics and animation don’t buy you anything. There’s a minimum level of slickness you want to see when you go to a site, and people will probably add those features as broadband becomes more common, but I expect you’ll see a lot of diminishing returns as well. Hazard: Fancy front-end technology slows down the user experience. Ultimately, that will turn people off. I was shopping on toy sites from home the other night. One loaded in one second, and one loaded in 15. Guess which one I bought from? Leonsis: There are sites out there that are just functional. Look at Yahoo. It’s not fancy; it’s just gray and blue. Look at us at AOL. We’re pretty much a flat site. You want to make buying really fast and easy. No videos, no bells and whistles. Just get to the point. Mooney: This has been a big myth for the last couple of years. There’s a tremendous focus on the cool things you can do. Technology has gotten ahead of the concept in many cases. The more important thing is to know what people want. Peabody: As broadband becomes more common, you’ll have to have this stuff. But today it’s not to your advantage to have a lot of bells and whistles. Sites like that are sort of annoying. Rich: Stay true to what your customers value: more efficiency or a faster download. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

About 4859 days ago E-Commerce

Brand Is Everything: The Word from the Experts

Myth 5: Brand is everything REALITY CHECK: Image is fine. Sales are better Eisenhardt: Just having a brand isn’t much. It doesn’t hold people when a competitor is only a click away — when it’s much easier to switch than it is in the physical world. CDNow had a brand in the music space, but that didn’t prevent customers from going to Amazon.com or Liquid Audio for music. In better companies, there is a real attention to metrics — a specialty of Yahoo, which is very good at monitoring key metrics and figuring out how to make money. Johnson: I don’t know if we’ve really made the big breakthroughs on the Web at this point. With motion pictures, it took 30 years before someone thought of doing a close-up. On the Internet we probably haven’t discovered the close-up yet. Mooney: We can tell which sites technicians have built and which have been built by people who understand retail. Retailers know where to put the most expensive stuff. They know how to trigger impulse buys. These formulations, fully developed for brick-and-mortar retail, haven’t been executed well on the Web yet. Peabody: Merchandising is absolutely the most critical component of any E-commerce company. People try to brand their sites, but it’s really more important to show an image of what you’ve got instead of asking customers to guess. If you let them guess, they’ll guess wrong. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

About 4859 days ago E-Commerce

Community, Community, Community: The Word from the Experts

Myth 7: Community, community, community REALITY CHECK: Not every business begets a cult Anderson: There is a huge myth out there that anyone can build an on-line community. Take my bank. I’ve been doing on-line banking since before the Web was the Web. Now, all of a sudden, my bank wants to become my portal. It wants to load up the page with news and sports. Everybody is trying to be a portal, but not all are destined to succeed. Johnson: It’s easy to see the appeal in building a community. When you talk about communities, the three or four sites that come to mind are AOL, GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod, all of which have created great riches. Lots of people want a feeling of belonging, and the Web has given that to them, through personal home pages and chats. Randall: About a year ago there was a huge thing being made about building communities, and it is still big. But there are a lot of customers who are very functionally driven, who simply want to go to a merchant and buy something. They don’t want a community. Rich: It really comes down to being smart about your users and your core business. Adding a community to a site that doesn’t meet customer needs or that offers a shoddy product won’t help. Also, building a community is a very complex and costly proposition. It requires a well-thought-out strategy, not just a lot of technology and money. You can end up damaging your company and your brand if you don’t implement it properly. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, ” I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”

About 4859 days ago E-Commerce

Building a Web Site Is Easy: The Word from the Experts

Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy REALITY CHECK: Oh, yeah? Try putting a traditional business on-line Anderson: The details in technology can clearly shut you down. We’re seeing that in our distance-learning efforts here at Babson. You’d think it would be very simple to prepare course materials that you’ve been using electronically for years and send them out via the Web. You quickly find out that customers have all different types of machines out there. Cramer: A lot of the technology out there doesn’t work well. Nobody admits it, because no one wants to tarnish the gloss that’s on the Web. Technology problems almost demolished us a dozen times. The first Internet service provider that we worked with was really bad. It was as if it was under contract with my personal enemies or with women whom I’d crossed before I got married. With the second, it was like these people were put on earth to destroy my business. Hazard: The real key to success is in improving the Web site over time. It’s really about having a feel for usage patterns — where people are spending time, where they’re getting stuck — and incorporating it into the design capabilities to allow you to go from generation one to five in a year. Johnson: It’s easy to build a bad Web site, harder to build a good one. The greater difficulties are in making a site easy for customers to use and in minimizing the number of clicks. The best example is Amazon’s one-click purchasing. It’s a pleasure to use after buying on a site that takes four, five, or six clicks to make a purchase. Peabody: At Tripod we struggled enormously, but that was because there was no off-the-shelf technology at the time. Today there’s so much more to buy. Of course, if you have a 30-year-old company with a special database, I wouldn’t be able to begin to tell you what to do. I’m sure there’s a lot of integrating that goes on. THE TRUTHMONGERS To help us deconstruct the myths of the Web, we turned to expert observers of the Internet phenomenon. Their comments can be found after each of the case studies we presented. Here are their credentials: Martin Anderson , management professor at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., advises executives who are transforming their traditional companies into “click and mortar” businesses. James J. Cramer is the brash cofounder of and columnist at TheStreet.com. He has built successful careers as both a journalist/pundit and a hedge-fund manager. Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor specializing in competitive strategy at Stanford’s School of Engineering. She recently coauthored Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Chip Hazard is a general partner and E-commerce specialist at the venture powerhouse Greylock, in Boston. He helped launch the e-Steel exchange. Tod Johnson , chairman and CEO of Media Metrix Inc., based in New York City, is a widely recognized expert on brand loyalty. Ted Leonsis is president of AOL Interactive Properties Group. In his first three years at America Online (starting in 1994), it grew from about $100 million in revenues to $1.5 billion. Kelly Mooney is director of intelligence at Resource Marketing Inc., a technology-marketing firm in Columbus, Ohio. She has helped companies such as Victoria’s Secret develop their on-line strategies. Allen Morgan is a general partner at Mayfield Fund, in Menlo Park, Calif. He has been involved in more than 350 venture-capital investments and public offerings. Bo Peabody is a cofounder of Tripod Inc. and vice-president of network strategy at Lycos Inc. When he was still in college, Peabody founded Tripod, which helps people build their own home pages. In 1998 he sold the company to Lycos. Scott Randall is founder and CEO of Internet-auction hosting service FairMarket Inc. Randall has been involved in E-commerce since 1995, when he launched an on-line store. He has been president of the Internet Shopping Network and Yahoo Marketplace. David Rich is vice-president of marketing and brand guru at Bigstep.com, which provides on-line services to small businesses. He previously orchestrated brand campaigns for Walt Disney, Pepsi, and Jamba Juice. THE 7 MYTHS OF THE WEB ECONOMY Myth 1: Building a Web site is easy The word from the experts Myth 2: Traffic will make you rich The word from the experts Myth 3: Smart money makes you smart The word from the experts Myth 4: Razzle-dazzle makes Web sites great The word from the experts Myth 5: Brand is everything The word from the experts Myth 6: Wild ads make Web stars The word from the experts Myth 7: Community, community, community The word from the experts Plus: Tales my guru told me Dispatches from the Web economy Back to Intro, “I Was Seduced by the Web Economy”