How do I start selling online?
From cheap and simple to expensive and complex, there's a wide range
of products designed to get your eCommerce site up and selling in
a matter of days or weeks. Small businesses may not have to look
beyond their local Internet service providers for a bare-bones solution.
For example, Brooklyn-based Forman Interactive offers Internet Creator
for less than $150. The software uses a series of wizards to help
you create secure pages for selling your product. Plus, if your
pages reside on Forman's servers, the company handles electronic
payments via CheckFree. If you're ready to step up, you can use
Yahoo's Yahoo Store, which lets you create a transactional business
Web site from your browser. Yahoo hosts the site, and the cost is
based on number of items--$100 per month for a store selling 50
items and $300 per month for up to 1,000 items. However, most eCommerce
development tools targeted at small and midsize businesses cost
$5,000 to $10,000. They generally include templates for online catalogs
and databases, so it's easy to change items and prices. Dynamic
database searches can serve different information when an item is
out of stock or on special, and they can be hooked up to existing
back-end systems for order fulfillment and a range of automatic
payment options. Companies that have a high volume of sales--especially
those that deliver soft goods such as articles, reports, software,
or music over the Net--require industrial-strength solutions costing
anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 or more. See the More Resources
column at right for examples of tools from all price ranges. Of
course, the software sticker price is only a small fraction of what
it costs to run an eCommerce site. Many high-end eCommerce products
are used by third-party companies to provide services for individual
merchants. Most companies take advantage of eCommerce hosting services
run by the likes of AT&T, MCI, and GTE's BBN Planet. "This
is a low-risk, low-cost way of finding out how to do it," says
Karl Lewis, vice president of production at Proxicom. Proxicom is
a Web consulting company that recently set up an eCommerce site
for Day-Timer and an extranet for Mobil Oil and its distributors.
What should be in a copyright statement on the website I've created?
I can give general advice, but consult your attorney about your
country's specific copyright laws. By US law, an article is protected
by copyright when it is published, whether or not you list copyright
information. You can register your documents with the Library of
Congress, though few do this for websites. The following statement
should be adequate for most purposes: "Copyright © 2000,
by John B. Doe. All rights reserved." The primary purpose of
your copyright statement is to put readers on notice that this is
your property. Since websites are so easy to copy, I usually go
further and say, "Text, graphics, and HTML code are protected
by US and International Copyright Laws, and may not be copied, reprinted,
published, translated, hosted, or otherwise distributed by any means
without explicit permission." It's difficult to enforce your
copyright in court -- the legal costs would be excessive. However,
it's usually sufficient to send violators a stiff note demanding
that they remove your copyrighted documents from their site immediately.
If they don't, contact their web hosting service. For a hosting
service to knowingly host stolen materials saddles them with legal
liability. Few are willing to risk it, so they usually force their
subscribers to remove the offending materials immediately.
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