Part 6: The holiday season

Do you have any advice for the smaller sites that maybe can't afford to hire a company like Future Now?
As I said earlier, Mark, my partners and I all built businesses of our own before Future Now. We don't come from an ivory tower world, nor are we are a group of well meaning but inexperienced twenty-somethings. In fact, the average age of our senior team is 40. With that as background, we've deliberately positioned ourselves to be as accessible as possible.

We are also committed to becoming the most comprehensive source of online sales information anywhere. We publish a free, unique, and irreverent newsletter called GrokDotCom which has gotten rave reviews and has subscribers around the world. Soon our RealWorldSales site will have a suite of free tools and downloadable white papers. Our plans also include seminars and workshops on e-sales as well as e-learning resources. For information about upcoming workshops and seminars, your readers can contact us at .

Certainly there will be some companies that can't afford us just because they don't have the cash. But for most prospects, the ROI is so incredible they truly have a hard time answering how can they not afford us? Think about it. Say your site has a closing ratio the same as the industry average, 2%. You'd love it if you could increase your sales 50%. One way is to run some kind of marketing campaign that will drive 50% more traffic to your site, if that's even possible and assuming you can handle the load. It may bump your sales 50% or it may not, and even if it does, it's just for that one time. Or, you can work with us to add just 1% more to your closing ratio. If you know what you're doing that isn't very hard, you haven't spent a dime on marketing or had to deal with a 50% higher customer load, and you'll have the benefit of that forever. Not really a difficult choice, is it?

Finally Jeffrey, care to give us your predictions for the 2000 Christmas online retail season?
Gee, Mark, I thought you'd never ask!

Certainly we will see overall sales volume go up. I agree with other forecasters in that regard. Unfortunately, though, all the press releases notwithstanding, most e-businesses still do not have their act together. On the other side of the equation, as the web continues to attract more first-time buyers, e-businesses are going to be faced with ever-higher expectations. The collision will not be pretty. Many sites will still crash, many customers will still be poorly served, many items still will not arrive on time and, ultimately, for many e-businesses this Holiday season will be their last gasp. Neither customers nor investors are willing to be as forgiving as in the past. So, sales will increase but, unfortunately, there will still be plenty of horror stories to write about in January.

It might sound cynical if I say the situation will help Future Now. It will, but I don't mean it cynically. Sometimes, unfortunately, it takes a real trauma to shake us out of our old ways of thinking about and doing business. In the end, that works to the benefit of both the e-business and the e-customer. But I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that we are still just at the beginning of e-commerce. When we're in the middle of it, thinking, eating, breathing, and struggling with it all the time, that's easy to forget. Upheavals and shakeouts are only to be expected, and in the process, the industry as a whole will get stronger and stronger. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact both B2B and B2C, as big as they've become, are still only tiny fractions of overall trade. The opportunities for e-businesses that do it right are still extraordinary.