Small Booksellers Competing with Amazon.com

from the reporters-are-so-much-fun dept

There have been lots of stories since last week's NYTimes columns on some small town guy selling books via the internet out of his house. The latest crop of these stories make it out as if this is a big threat to Amazon.com. I don't think so. While the reports claim that this lucky guy has turned the business into a $4,000 a day business, that has something to do with him being lucky enough to be written about in the NYTimes. That says something about what you need to do to build a successful online commerce site: you need to build traffic to your site. That's expensive. You need to be able to handle the traffic, which means scalable systems. That's expensive. You also need to keep your customers happy and coming back. That involves excellent customer service and a real understanding of the Internet. That's both expensive, and often something you can't buy. However, if you want to go beat Amazon.com at it's own game, go ahead. I wish you the best of luck. We all know how well Barnes and Noble did at that game...