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Start Me Up
For small business, selling over the Internet morphs into a means, not an end
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Business New Haven
5/13/2002
By: E.A. Linden
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Goe Lindy is a small-business owner. He runs an antiques and appraisals business out of his house in Woodbridge, something he has done for more than three decades. But now, Lindy hopes, something is going to revolutionize the way he does business: the Internet.
“I am a very small business. I am also what's considered a dinosaur,” Lindy explains of his relative computer illiteracy.
But recently all that changed. Lindy discovered the potential of eBay for a business such as his - so much so that today most of his sales are generated by online auctions.
Additionally, Lindy gained recognition on eBay as a regular dealer, and as such he recently received a phone call from AOL.
“They said they would set up a Web site for me,” Lindy says of the query. “It only takes them a week, and then I pay $29.95 a month to run it from my home office. They said they will make it very simple so that someone like me can use it.”
Lindy is hardly alone in his eagerness to get his business online. From the ashes of the dot.com bust, today many small-business owners are turning to online sales not to replace, but to supplement their in-house income.
David Lesser of Woodbridge is another small-business owner who is benefiting from his own Web site. His business, David M. Lesser Books, can be found online at www.lesserbooks.com, where he catalogues the rare and used books he has for sale. Lesser has been online for five of his business' dozen years in operation.
“Online business is growing in just about every field, especially bookselling,” Lesser notes. He cites a “general awareness” of online activity for spurring him to take his business online. Like Lindy, Lesser hired someone to design his site for him.
For small, specialized businesses like Lesser's, most customers discover the Web site via links from other sites. It is rare for a customer to run into his site without trying. Lesser explains the site's traffic as very specific to the book-buying industry.
“In the book business there are several search engines,” he says, “like the Advanced Book Exchange or the Antiquarian Booksellers of America. Dealers upload their books to these sites and then the customer can search for a title. When the book comes up, the customer can then follow the link to the booksellers site, if he has one.”
till, even with the help of such search engines, frequently Web sites serve mainly to get a customer to call in or visit the store in person. Many customers, and businesses, still seem wary of doing business online.
One example is WorldTek Travel of New Haven, a travel agency that books flights and accommodations and which began in 1966.
Even with a corporate name such as this, sales online remain slow. As Debbie Russo, an agent in WorldTek's New Haven office, explains, “We get a lot of hits, but people really seem to want to talk to [a WorldTek representative] about travel plans.”
WorldTek's Web site, then, serves the company as a kind of customer funnel, not so much to actually sell trips. If a customer should want to make plans online, she or he must e-mail WorldTek with a range of dates and prices, to which the agent will respond, initiating a dialogue about the travel plans, rather than allowing the customer to order the tickets online with a virtual shopping cart.
“I honestly have to say that most of the people I e-mail don't actually book with us. In the time that we've been online, I've booked maybe three people that way,” Russo explains.
Eric Simons, a customer service representative for Earthstores.com, agrees that “The sales boost of a small business that goes online can vary greatly.” Earthstores is just one of many companies that create sites for businesses to expand online. Like the AOL service Lindy employs, Earthstores charges by the month, the fee depending on the number of products a merchant wants to display.
Simons explains that “once [a business] signs up for a site, most of it is already built for them - our system opens a complete and functioning e-commerce Web site when they sign up. All they really have to do it fill in the blanks.”
But “filling in the blanks” is not always as simple as it sounds. Not every merchant already has digital product images or information entered into their computer, so while some businesses may be able to get online in a matter of hours once Earthstores has created a template for the site, others may take a matter of weeks.
For some businesses, going online is a gradual process. Robert Vallombroso, for example, began his rare tickets brokerage 18 years ago when he was still in high school. Now his New Haven-based business is a “more than full time job,” and he credits his Web site for helping to reduce his workload.
“It helps to have information online because I am only one person. With the Web site, I can answer many people's questions at once, where everything is spelled out for them.” Robstickets.com opened its original informational site in 1997 and has since grown into a full-fledged e-commerce site where people can buy tickets using their credit cards.
Still, Vallombroso explains, his sales have not significantly grown since the site became fully enabled for orders last year. This he attributes in part to September 11 and the nature of his business. “People weren't really going anywhere,” he explains.
So while the benefits of going online for small businesses are sometimes plain, frequently the Internet serves merely a secretarial function while the one or two employees of the business itself still deal with the actual sales functions.
Lindy's one-man antiques shop is a good example of a business that could either seriously benefit from an online store, or wallow in relative oblivion. Simons of Earthstores asserts that the deciding factor invariably is “how much or how little the merchant promotes his site.”
Lindy is already one step ahead, however, thanks to his activity on eBay which is already steering buyers to his site. Lindy looks forward to the potential activity his new online store may spark, but he is not letting it go to his head. Right now he is more concerned with having an easy-to-use interface, not only for his customers, but also for him. “I only turned on a computer about two years ago,” Lindy explains.
With more and more small businesses going online, and evermore site providers to help them get started, Lindy will surely not be the greenest online retailer to fire up his own site. After 30 years of selling antiques out of his house, Lindy is ready for a new challenge.
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