INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
The Wal-Martization of E-Commerce

Now all you need is a good idea to make some good money. You can start right away by getting a dot-com domain name registration for a year for much less than US$1 a month, and get a sparkling Web site for under $5 per month. For an additional $3 a month, get an encryption capability on the same site so you can offer secure online credit card transactions. Cha-ching. Plus e-mail and many other things thrown in for free.

In principal you will have almost the same basic e-commerce tools as any other large-size corporation. All that power and those business tools for under $10 per month.

This is not a fiction; it's a reality at http://www.godaddy.com, the fastest growing domain registrar in the world. CEO Bob Parsons, the boy wonder among the hundreds of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) domain registrars, is not only very aggressive but also very business savvy: "if you don't have a Web site, then obviously there is something seriously wrong with you."

Everyone Can Play

He believes in making e-commerce functionalities very easy and very cheap so every single person can play the game.

E-commerce is no longer an expensive process or an exclusive club. These phenomenal cost reductions compounded by the awareness of e-commerce explain the new worldwide boost in the domain name activity.

Think, just a few years ago, BooBoo.com paid $170 million to get its Web site finished. Of course, it went belly-up in the first 100-plus days before the site could go up.

In those days, there were ChooChoo's and FooFoo's, everyone needed millions to start any type of an e-commerce project, thousands of shocking stories floated around the globe. Corporate identity practices got kicked for creating too many silly name brands. Big bucks created that short boom time, but now pennies are going to create long-lasting good times.

It's cyber time, and once again a different kind of a boom overtakes America. This time, it might be in pennies, but its big economical impact will be felt much later.

The influx of new business sites with new ideas, the new entrepreneurial spirit and the new exposure to innovation are fuelling this American grass root revolution in silence. Until each and every one of us ends up with a site, a portal with full e-commerce tools making us fully equipped citizens of an e-commerce-driven society, then and only then will we hear its thunder.

Support Services

We have no option but to do this, as other nations are also in the same race. Very soon, some smart cities and towns, and eventually countries, will be offering all this and more for free to the entire population -- guaranteed.

During all this, those support services, which were feeding on the earlier boom and offered super expensive deals, are in a deep freeze. Only very pragmatic and highly measurable ROI support services are left in the game. Traditional branding and big budget advertising is gasping in need of oxygen.

The Internet is littered with services offering logos and branding at prices that are only pennies. The future clearly points to a Wal-Martization of overall corporate services. Imagine, now, $10 per month makes you a serious player in e-commerce.

Of course, this figure is just to make a point, as many businesses still require millions at the starting gate.

Grass Root Cyber Branding Revolution

Now that the tools are in place, it also opens a brand new door to educate and improve the functionality of Web site holders so they can advance to higher grounds. Flat and boring, the first generation Web sites and old-fashioned designs are over.

Also the earlier generation, long and twisted domain names are now requiring some educational support to make them highly transactional and, most importantly, proprietary and globally brandable in nature. This can be achieved very easily via distant learning, Web-conferencing and other e-commerce tools.

E-commerce is growing and multiplying on its own and behaving like an alien blob from some other planet.

With some sophisticated contents and educational components, it can exponentially increase the visibility for these millions of operators of brands and marketers of services, all projecting their growth from the grass roots. Not bad at all, in contrast to the old-style, slow-paced business cycles, measured only in decades and for economists to later chew about.

E-commerce's gatekeepers, the domain registrar face these new challenges to provide more and more value-added services while the customer's challenge is to optimize the exposure of his/her goods and services.

Attainable Goals

Both goals are not only doable but also rather very logical.

Registrars must become more sophisticated than just a hit-and-run registration. Value-added services not only bring in higher margins but also turn them into real players. Corporate branding, global naming expertise and sharper strategies for higher exposure and visibility will fill the vacuum, like the newspapers of the early days and how they later became top media companies.

E-commerce is about to engross all of us, and for anyone to play, all that is needed is an idea, $10 and some brains on the go.