Stephen Horrillo said:
I've been in sales all my life so when I look at a website those are the
eyes I'm looking from. Where do you think your paycheck comes from? If the
site doesn't financially pull it's weight it's useless.
This is pretty much true for anything, be it a website, a new store in a
retail chain or 'the new guy' joining the sales team.
But... when it comes to a new store location and a sales person the value it
brings to the whole is pretty black and white by just looking at the
numbers. With a website, however, you have to not only look at the sales it
can make on its own... but also in what it brings to the company and any
customers it brings in to the physical locations.
A website probably has the lowest return
on investment than anything on Earth!
I think this is too all encompassing... that websites have the lowest ROI
than anything...
First is the obvious case of the dot com companies... companies who can
measure ROI in terms of thousands of percent.
I don't subscribe to the belief that "the dot com bubble has burst"... I
think it is more a case where people's greed and stupidity caught up with
them and alot of people were suckered because they were blinded by the
thought of becoming an overnight millionaire. There are still plenty of
"dot com" companies out there that are doing very well, but gone are the
days where you could register a domain name and come up with some idea and
then IPO yourself for $100,000,000... in the mid 1990s investors were
afraid they were going to "miss the boat" if they didn't buy something and
it took off - they didn't want to miss out on the next "big thing" that
would make them an instant millionaire and so in only a short time everybody
threw every rule out the window as far as playing the stock market wisely
and just bought whatever they could and hoped it was going to take off.
Secondly, I think you can sell just about anything on the internet... but
that doesn't mean a website is the best way to sell something.
A website can be a great way to open your goods/services up to a wider
market... especially if you are selling the rare and obscure items or goods
everybody wants at a lower rate than they can get locally. But if you are
just selling junk or things that people can get at the same price on pretty
much any street corner of their home town then I wouldn't expect to see much
in the way of sales.
Likewise, some things can just be better sold by somebody activly
selling the item rather than a website passivly selling them something (IE:
cars and houses - where the customer can take a test drive or can tour the
house and imagine what it would look and feel like to live there). But that
again doesn't mean you can't sell these over the net... in the case of
houses, the internet can open your houses to people in other cities or
countries who are planning to move... or customers who want to sit at home
and view a few hundred different possibilities to pick that "dream home"
instead of just limiting themselves to seeing just a few houses a day and
settling on one.
Next, I think you can sell just about anything on the internet... but that
doesn't mean that just having a website = sales.
I'm sure quite a few people here have had this happen: You build an
ecommerce website for a client and put it up on the internet for him/her and
then about a week later they call you back with a "Hey, my website has been
up for a week and I haven't made any sales yet... whats wrong with my site?
Is it working?"
The problem here is often that many businesses put up a website and then
don't think about how they are going to market and promote the website -
they seem to think that just having a website is good enough and that the
sales will just start magically rolling in with little to no work on their
part.