Work at Home Idea:
Start an e-Business
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$45 billion! That's how much money e-commerce businesses are expected to generate in sales this year alone. Want to get in on the action? This handy guide can take you step by step through the process of setting up shop on the Web.
Inside you'll find everything you need to know about creating a successful e-business, including expert advice on
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funding your online venture
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low-cost site building
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design tips and techniques
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sure-fire ways to attract customers
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the benefits of affiliate programs
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why customer service should be one of your top priorities
and more
What does it take to build a dotcom that will survive? Read this guide and you'll know, because in these pages, you'll find recipes for success, roadmaps that pinpoint the hazards, and dozens of interviews with dotcom builders who have already cashed in.
If you want to get in on an industry that still offers loads of potential to those willing to work hard and put in the effort it takes to succeed, start smart and order this guide today!
This guide from Entrepreneur.com is necessary before diving into this home business venture.
Book Excerpt
Assembly lines around the world are churning out mass-produced items that are purchased almost as fast as they can be made. But consumer acceptance of low-cost look-alike goods hasn’t eliminated the demand for handcrafted items—although those items are likely to have a much different function today than in the past.
This is it—your chance to strike it very rich because suddenly, the Internet has changed all the rules. For a half-century, the big players in business, from IBM to Exxon, dominated the game, leaving little room for newcomers to move to the top of the heap. Then in 1994 a little start-up named Netscape introduced a Web browser, and the race for cash was on. Amazon, eToys, Wine.com, e-Trade, Motley Fool, ChannelPoint, Monster.com—today, they are billion-dollar businesses, but where were they five years ago? Out of nowhere these companies, and hundreds more, have emerged to challenge the gods of commerce. They are succeeding because the new rules favor small companies that are flexible, smart, tough and ultra-quick to react to changing market conditions.
Chew on these numbers: Information technology consulting firm GartnerGroup predicts that sales in business-to-business e-commerce will hit a staggering $2.7 trillion in 2004. By 2005, online sales of consumables (from prescriptions to groceries and wine) will reach $119 billion, according to consulting group ActiveMedia. And in the 1999 Christmas shopping season, consumers spent $7 billion online, with 90 percent of the buyers saying they were largely satisfied with the experience, according to Jupiter Communications, a firm that tracks trends on the Web.
The Internet is for real, and in the 21st century, if you’re not on it, you’re not in business. That is today’s reality byte.
A New Set Of Rules
On the Web, the advantage is yours—it belongs to the entrepreneur. Why? Consider Compaq. It makes fine computers; maybe no better than its competitors, but certainly no worse. So why has it been stumbling while a comparative upstart like Dell has soared into market leadership? Dell long ago made the leap into full-steam Web retailing. It yanked its merchandise out of retail stores and threw the dice, betting the company’s future on direct selling (via catalogs and the Web) to corporations and individuals. Compaq, meanwhile, has faltered at every step because it doesn’t want to alienate its established retail channels, convinced they would be irked if suddenly the same computers were available for less on the Internet. So Compaq dithers, and in that indecision it loses momentum and leadership while upstarts grab market share.
The Web is both a new distribution channel and a new way of doing business. Don’t miss either part of that statement. Think of the Web only as a new channel—a different way of putting products and services in front of customers—and you miss the threat and the promise of the Internet, which is that it will utterly change how you do business. For one thing, the Web is ruthless in the squeeze it puts on pricing. Fat and waste have to go, and good riddance, because many large companies (and too many small companies) have grown comfortably wealthy by exacting indefensible margins out of the retail process. No more. The Web stomps margins flat, and to make profits, companies have to rethink where their dollars will be earned. Big companies (most of them) have responded to these new rules by shutting their eyes and praying the moment will pass. (Think of the big banks that treat customers terribly, pay laughable interest rates and are forever hiking fees. Most are doomed to be dinosaurs in the 21st century.) All of this is good news for you because it means you have a wide-open playing field before you.
Better still, the opportunities are unlimited. Would it be wise to go head-to-head against Yahoo or Amazon? Not directly, because these companies are among the few Internet businesses that can legitimately claim to have established major consumer brands. But the Web is so young, possibilities are everywhere. Want proof? Read on for a few amazing stories of Internet success popping up where most people would least expect it.
Insuring Success
Ken Hollen is chipping away at a number: $54 billion. That’s how much is wasted every year by a bureaucratic, bloated, inefficient insurance industry, according to research by investment bank Robertson Stephens Inc. That money is coming out of every pocket in this nation for no good reason, other than that insurance companies just don’t get it.
Hollen does get it. As CEO of ChannelPoint (www.channelpoint.com), a Colorado Springs, Colorado, Internet company, he’s created an efficient Web-based marketplace that links insurers with customers and brokers, saving billions of dollars for all of us while pocketing a few billion more for Hollen and his investors. “We have the ability to deliver breakthrough values,” says Hollen, whose company has constructed tools that move most insurance transactions onto the Web, where things happen both faster and cheaper than through traditional channels. “We can offer insurance carriers cost reductions of 50 to 90 percent on the administrative side and dramatically improve their customer service. We’ve already shown we can cut the time involved in case processing from 45 days down to between two and five.”
Wow—that’s a win-win-win: Insurers win by cutting costs, customers win by reaping some savings and greater efficiency in service, and Hollen wins by earning a profit every time he processes a transaction. And that is exactly what the Internet is about.
ChannelPoint traces its birth to 1996, when Ken Hollen and his brother, Jim, quit their day jobs to found a little Web start-up, Icon Health, with the mission of making healthcare plan information readily available to members. Within months, Icon Health was snapped up, for an undisclosed amount, by emerging Net giant Healtheon (now Healtheon/WebMD), the brainchild of Net legend Jim Clark, the co-founder of Netscape and, before that, Silicon Graphics. Ken Hollen wasn’t enthusiastic about being a part of what was becoming a large company, so he held back rights to insurance company-related software Icon Health had created. Healtheon didn’t hesitate to accept that exclusion, and Hollen had the intellectual tools that let him start ChannelPoint.
A Star Is Born
Now, remember just a few lines ago I advised against challenging Yahoo? That only applies to Yahoo’s own turf. If you’re willing to expand your horizons a little, one entrepreneur discovered, the sky’s the limit. Tune into New York City’s StarMedia Network (www.starmedia.com), a company co-founded by Fernando Espuelas in 1996 after he quit AT&T because the giant company just wouldn’t listen to his idea for building a Web portal aimed at South America. Born in Uruguay, Espuelas knew the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world craved Web content in their own languages, but there was little of that to be found anywhere on the Net. Business plan in hand, Espuelas marched from venture capitalist to venture capitalist—and always emerged empty-handed. “Many North Americans think ‘yo quiero Taco Bell’ is all they need to know about Latin America,” he says. “They didn’t take the idea of an Internet company for Latinos seriously.”
With no other funding to be found, Espuelas was forced to use his credit cards, and every month he watched his balance soar higher. Just when it was about to be lights out for his dream, Chase Capital Partners (an arm of Chase Manhattan bank) called and said it liked the idea of a Latino portal and wanted to invest $3 million—if Espuelas could convince them he was the man to run such an enterprise. “They asked for 60 references,” he says. “And they checked them all.” Chase liked what it heard and ponied up the cash, and today StarMedia is a leader in a booming South American market as well as a publicly traded company with a market capitalization above $2 billion. Not a bad outcome for a guy on the verge of maxing out his credit cards.
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This guide from Entrepreneur.com is necessary before diving into this home business venture.
Disclaimer: The information presented and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent the views of Work-at-Home-Business.com and/or its partners.
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