Biba - a lesson for us all

Last night I went to an evening hosted by those lovely people at Rackspace at the Kensington Roof Gardens. It all came back to me. This was BIBA.

You can tell how old you are when you are the only person in a group to remember BIBA. In the 60's it was the epitomy of cool. A department store like no other. High fashion sold in the exotic art deco surroundings of the old Derry and Tom's store. A massive place, set like a stage with mood lighting and notoriously snooty sloan ranger assistants. An at the top of it all the 30's roof garden where you could have a coffee and watch the beautiful people.

Why did it fail? A combination of things:

• The mood lighting made it rather too easy for shoplifters and 'shinkage' was crippling.
• It was a great tourist atraction and people came to look not to shop
• Accountants took over and drove it down-market, looting this fabulous brand until it died.

A lesson for us all. No matter how great it is, it has to work.

email flurry - haven't seen one of those for years

Someone (at http://www.ampsl.com/) sent out a spam email with the addresses of the recipeints in the mail. This meant that everyone saw who it was going to. One of many - so I deleted it as usual.

However it started to get replies. Someone decided to mail everyone with their offer. Then spam filters started relying to the list with bounce messages. Then we got angry 'please remove me' messages.

All of these got sent to everyone, and we seemed to reach some sort of critical mass where I must have got about 50 emails.

This used to be quite a regular occurance before people understood how to spam, but it has been years.

The last mail said this. I like it.

"After receiving numerous emails from Ampsl Intl ltd with kind offers to buy their products I felt their sales staff would not mind considering products we offer to sell so I sent our marketing info to sales@ampsl.com.

I am sure their sales team sales@ampsl.com would like to hear from all their email friends as to what we as "the ampsl email database" have to offer them "

So lets all send them something...

Another one down

Another site released... things are getting busy around here..

What should an e-commerce site cost?

Should an ecommerce site cost £1,000, £10,000 or £50,000? There is a big disconnect between our development costs for an ecommerce site and many prospect's expectations.

• With a designer, we developed an ecommerce brand and web site (www.dotcomstore.co.uk) and used Pay Per Click (PPC) to get clients. I think it is a great site, and it seemed like a pretty good wheeze at the time. We spent a couple of grand on PPC before we gave up. Why? We got lots of leads but every one of them expected to spend £2,000 or less on their web site.
• www.firstratedirectory.co.uk is a pretty smart lead generation web site. They publish requests for information (RFI) aimed at people in our businesss. I don't believe I have seen an ecommerce RFI on the site ever with a budget of more than £5k. Mostly budgets are in the low four figures. I recall someone who wanted an ecommerce site for an auto parts business with a full bill of materials breakdown and a budget of £2k.

There is no way we can produce a web site for this sort of number. A good design by a competent designer is in the £3-6k range and even a very vanilla site will take us a week to set up. So our starting budget is around £6k and we go up to £50k for the bigger more custom sites.

Are we doing something wrong? One of our clients decided for very good reasons to use a (very) serious hosted US-based service called Netsuite. Sadly there was some confusion about who was going to skin the various functions and we ended up doing it. My programmer was on this for about four days with the HTML already cut. This stuff can be complicated.

The only way these expectations can be met as far as I can see is:

• Use a pre-existing template married to a vanilla ecommerce system. Literally plug and go.
• Off-shore the work.

There is obviously a market for the first approach. I have had a few leads myself from people with low level operations and a vanilla requirement who I have pointed at a templated system. However the leads I am discussing above are for people who's business model justifies something better than this, indeed won't get anywhere without a substantial marketing budget.

The other issue is that project management time is often disproportionately high for low-budget projects, simply because small clients don't have the internal disciplines of larger companies. A £2k budget could easily be eaten up in client relations.

The £64,000 question is what happens to these guys? Do they get a serious site built in India for £2,000 and then go on to make their first million or do all these enterprises disappear?
Should I be developing a templated £2k solution or stick to my knitting? If I do, how do I control project management costs?