lonecity.com

For more than half my life I have worked in and around the traditional brick and mortar retail business.  I’ve gotten to know the trends and can easily see when items will sell or will not sell.   Sadly with the massive growth of the MegaRetailer Walmart and the bursting out of the internet into retail markets, many traditional retailers don’t have alot to look foreward to.   Traditionally a store’s sales plan would be calculated by taking last years same day sales, adjusting for a few economic factors, then adding a few percent for the growth in the community and in trademark recognition.  All in all you could pretty much expect that the sales plan would be a few hundred or a few thousand more than it was last year.  The trend I’m starting to see is that retailers are no longer able to make these increase plan goals.  The brick and mortar system will probably never die but I think it has reached saturation and many retailers will start to plan on making less if they want to survive.

It is with that knowledge that I have started my own foray into the business world looking at online retail as the way to make my fortune.  Everywhere I turn I see the potential to make money.  Many investors were scared away by the big DotCOM bubble burst, and thats a good thing for me.  The problem with most dotcom business models is that they based their ideas on the possibility of infinite growth. To take for an example pets.com they saw astounding increases in sales after launching their website.  Everyone wanted in because everyone wanted a part of the massive increase. The underlying problem is that every day there are a finite number of people who will buy a bag of dogfood online.  At launch pets.com hadn’t come anywhere near that capacity.  Still with massive growth they fumbled right past the point of saturation and found themselves with more goods than they could ever hope to sell.  This same situation plagued most dotcom startups until massive failure swept the market.

One of the most important things to have in business is your brand.  Anyone can tell you that pets.com is a million dollar name.  Even if the company behind it folds and folds again there will still be people every day who type in the name looking for that bag of dog food.  Likewise, everyone has heard about the guy who registered some short easily memorable domain name and sold it for millions.  But what has happened to the entreprenuer who wants to start an online business.  What do we do now that there isn’t any stellar names left.  In recent years companies that once made profits by registering domains for end users have taken to buying up domains.  At first this was to mark them up and soak end users for the profit.  It sucks, but I agree with their entreprenurial spirit.  However now many have gone one step too far.  Instead of marking up and selling the domains at a profit some companies have begun refusing to sell.  One of these companies name media has gotten to the point where they have registered tens of thousands of names and they are holding them for ransom.  So far they haven’t broken any of the rules, but were only talking the rules that exist today.  If these giant companies who aren’t playing fair continue to grow at some point the internet itself will break. 

Instead of bieng able to build a brand small business owners will have to buy visitors from companies that own all the brands.  The benefit to small business is completely gone and soon they won’t continue offering their products.  Business are there to make money and having to pay for each person who walks through their doors just doesn’t make sense.  (except to the guys getting paid)  As business starts to decline because companies can’t effectively market their products at a gain, the internet will stagnate.  Our only option is to change the way people find what they’re looking for online.  I like the type in “something.com” setup and I’d hate to see it go away but the nails are already in the coffin. 

 So what do you think?  Is creating some sort of anti-monopoly domain law the only way to turn things around.  One thing I came across while researching for the article I wrote on fidel castro was an interesting concept he put in place while ruling in cuba.  He made it a law that nobody could own more than 5 acres of land.  This puts an interesting spin on the domain monopoly idea.  If we were to limit the number of domains any one entity could own to say 200 or so every business or individual could reasonably compete and we still wouldn’t be unfair to the registrars and companies that are presently monopolizing the domain names.  They could keep the names they really want but they would be forced to concider what names they really want.  The older brother is hogging all the toys even though he doesn’t have time to play with them all.  Its time mom reached back and made him share with the younger siblings…