Buy Anything Online: The Art of It All
By Art Gib
There’’s no way to tell what sort of web site, or Internet strategy will take off. Certainly there are many ideas floated out there, new ones every day for sure. Some make it but the vast majority of them fail to gain purchase in the fickle mind of the Internet surfer, who spends very little time in deciding if a site is worth its time to visit.
In the Internet world there are sites that provide information, like news, sports, etc. There are others that provide opinion and humor, and there are others that offer to sell you something.
The world of e-commerce has become a massive engine running on the adrenaline of shoppers who prefer to let their keyboard and credit cards do the talking. Our opinions are formed very quickly and a site’’s success depends upon establishing a positive thought with just a very few seconds of a new potential customer seeing it.
Shopping sites must have both a nice, easy-to-navigate site, and a product to sell for which there is a demand. One cannot survive without the other. So, many sites come and many sites go.
Many sites use other peoples” products or services as the fuel, providing a venue for their sale. Sites like eBay are examples of this. One of the other sites like that is Etsy, which had an inauspicious beginning like a vast majority of other sites that just seem to “catch on” in a very big way.
Etsy started out as a place where people who make arts and crafts, and generally hand made items can establish a community relationship and sell their products to the public. The site takes a small percentage of sales, like eBay does, and in return acts as a magnet online for people looking for the type of product the site specializes in.
In 2005, when the site was founded, one would have to look far and wide for items such as home-made baskets, purses, handbag organizers or other handy household items. The site has also become a gathering place of merchants who do art pieces, and a whole plethora of other similar items.
The site caught on, and now people who like to find that sort of thing online know that they can find a whole world of those types of products under one roof. There are many merchants there who make a good living designing, creating, and constructing items in their own homes for sale on the Internet, without having to absorb the cost of trying to get their own site built and marketed, hoping it might catch on.
About The Author
Simply Sarah (http://simplysarahshaw.com/) sells womens accessories, including handbag organizers. Art Gib is a freelance writer.