On-line merchants are forever talking about how you can buy just about anything you want on the Web.
The truth is, it’s not at all easy to find what you want amid the clutter of Web sites.
One of the reasons Amazon.com is so successful is that it’s likely to have the book you’re looking for. There are few Amazon.com equivalents for other consumer items.
A Seattle “Baby Bill” startup company run by former Microsoft executive Dwayne Walker is trying to improve the Web shopping experience. Web shopping, called e-commerce, is expected to explode later this year as banks and financial institutions, by now convinced that security issues have been addressed, start promoting the notion of Web shopping through discounts, rebates and other incentives.
Walker’s company, TechWave, has two stores of its own on the Web. It sells more than 50,000 computer products at buysoftware.com, and it offers try-before-you-buy software on TryAndBuy (http://www.tryandbuy. com). Since their launch last year, the stores have proved successful enough to hand TechWave a 100 percent year-to-year revenue gain. The company has more than 100 employees, up 30 percent since the beginning of the year.
Beyond the storefronts, however, TechWave has been partnering with scores of vendors to provide their sites with commerce capabilities. On that side, its business is exploding. In December, the Seattle-based company had 50 partners; just 90 days later the number was more than 200.
Among them: Earthlink, the Internet service provider; accountingnet.com; and PCFixx.
What’s TechWave’s secret? It offers on-line vendors a cheaper, simpler way to start selling their goods and services over the Web. Building its own site can cost a vendor up to $1 million, months to develop, and $300,000 to $500,000 a year in ongoing support costs. TechWave can get the vendor up and running for less than $10,000 in just 48 hours, Walker said.
The vendor gets to keep its brand presence. About all you might notice is a TechWave logo or emblem on the site, like the Dolby insignia on a stereo player or Intel Inside on a PC, along with the slogan, “Powered by TechWave.”
The partnering strategy plays right to Walker’s Microsoft-derived strengths. Throughout the early to mid-’90s he helped build Microsoft’s Solution Provider Channels Group, now a $2 billion-a-year effort that fueled the Windows NT boom and Microsoft’s success with large corporations and enterprises.
Walker foresees the rise of community-based commerce on the Web. Like minds come to a site not just to shop, but to trade information, recommendations and tips. This model, an extension of newsgroups and mailing lists on the Internet, is another secret of success at Amazon.com, which posts comments and reviews from its customers for the benefit of others.
E-commerce may come to adopt a mall approach, another example of the digital world emulating a real-life model. Such jumping-off sites make sense when you consider that, just as television viewers tend to watch five to seven stations no matter how many are offered, Web viewers settle on five to 12 sites they visit regularly, Walker said. Using TechWave’s software can make the shopping experience consistent from site to site–another plus for consumers who don’t want to learn a different mode of e-shopping for each site they visit.