[plug] On-line bookshops

[Colin Muller]

skribe wrote:

> Perhaps, but I'm certain that it all comes down to their bottom
> line.  Designing and running an online bookshop isn't cheap in time or
> money.  If they believe the amount of extra sales they'll generate through
> the web site isn't going to compensate them sufficiently, then they'd be
> foolish to do it.

Agreed, but I think there's room to establish a solid on-line presence
without spending an undue amount of time or money on it. A tightly
focused catalogue of, say, WA-related books could give a shop like
Boffins a really good on-line presence, and people would immediately
start emailing them for other titles - the handling of which would cost
no more than the handling of phone queries.

Working from a restricted-size special-interest catalogue, they could
establish a convincing presence using Linux, Apache, OpenSSL and
Minivend on a co-located server, paying for an x86 server with 256MB
RAM, perhaps a month's worth of Web development time, co-lo costs and
minimal monthly sysdamin, and hitting the black within the first year if
it sells them three books a day @ $75 each (assuming a one-third markup,
which I seem to recall is the standard on books). They don't need to set
up the book-buying infrastructure or anything like that - they're doing
all that already.

Of course, they've probably spoken to someone who told them they need a
50-user NT/SQL server licence on a 4-CPU Gee-Whiz, expensive proprietary
shopping cart software, a permanent 128K connection and lots of Shock,
Flash and RealVideo.

Colin