David Sudjiman

Okay, here are the non-important-another-bullshits about the failure of E-Commerce.

Monkey See, Monkey Do
Seeing other E-Commerce site that has been successfully penetrated and changed the way people buying culture is quite tempting. Imagine the prestige and all of those mambo-jumbo of money farm that people tempted to gain.

I began to notice some of the ideas came up in about 20-10 years ago that the rose of E-Commerce lead some of traditional companies tried this E-Commerce solutions and approach, and failed!

Most of the companies were tempted by margins and believe almost anything the fresh graduate consultants said about the new era of Commerce, Electronic Commerce. They believe that if you can invest in this E-Commerce, you will get your money back within certain years or even months. Not long after those promising ideas, Dot-Com started to fall, sadly, into pieces.

People did forget about the necessity to have the core of E-Commerce build-up first as the first core layer and that is the company traditional structure. Company that would likely to succeed or at least exist, is the company that still keep the traditional culture of commerce, you have to gain the money and do the selling!

Flowers, smell good, sell good.
Look at the example for that old company like FTD. FTD began its company from retail shops that have been exist on the street from 1910; most of you probably have not even born yet. They already had the market from those old years, had the customers, and had the system ready. The first electronic version of FTD were formed from the alliance of 15 florists and created “Florists’ Telegraph Delivery” with the intention to gain more money, and not to gain prestige! From there, they started to build the empire with what they already had and tried to add another mechanism. They were not trying to shift the commerce but rather to expand what they had.

Another example is the 1-800-flowers. 1-800-flowers started the brick and mortar shop on 1976 and expanding the shop in a traditional way into 14 flower shops. On 1986, Jim McCann, CEO, bought the number 1-800-flowers and started to sell flowers from phone. 1-800-flowers used this phone technology as an extension for marketing purpose while still doing the brick-and-mortar shops. Slowly, it adapted the online presence with the online appearance in year 1992. The brilliant (and worked) movement was the strategic alliance with another ‘internet company’ to support its promotion on the internet. This including America Online, Microsoft Network (MSN), and Yahoo!.

However, there is no silver bullet for these companies to succeed. There is no guarantee if you have your own traditional company and you would likely to succeed. There are more dot-com companies that flops than the survivors and those people ain’t stupid!

You can found hundreds of reasons why dot-coms companies fell, and allow me to add or rephrase those regrets.

Those smart CEO probably already knew this and left the company before it sank. A good retreat to outsmart the unbearable fall. One of the main reasons that people want to invest to Dot-Com is the promises about quick BEP. The formula was (considered) right but it was wrong. Like for instance you can get many viewers but you don’t get the money. You can get the money by putting banners, but it was hardly to a get a company who wanted to put banner in your website. Giving free information services like news so you could attract more people and make other companies are interested to put their banner on you website, but after you crafting the formula and tried to walk on the path, people don’t like your website because it’s not easy to navigate. You hired the best web programmer but he/she does not know anything about business and information architecture. You hired the best business manager but then they outsmart you and you kicked them out.

For non-product selling website, people are expecting to have more and more viewers but still, there are no silver bullet to convert those hits and visited page into money.

Now, what I see, there are the small Dot-Com companies that trying to sell goods within local area in particular place that have a good transportation to deliver goods. These are not gigantic Enterprise companies; it’s just another company on the corners that promote goods on the Internet and deliver the product. Small and Easy.