If you are a business owner, you will likely have aspirations of high sales figures, loyal customers and growing budgets. One way of helping you get your business heading in the right direction, and in this case online business, is to look up to businesses which currently captivate and entice millions of people around the world to invest in, log on to and buy from their websites. By taking a look at the heavy hitters out there you can see what makes them an online success and what advice you can take from their example to help your business improve.
By using the Alexa top 500 websites in the world list, which calculates its list based on the highest combination of visitors and page views, picking websites which are basically ecommerce sites and discounting websites that are search engines or directories or social networking, this list of most successful online businesses becomes a bit more interesting and less of a popularity contest.
Tucked in at No.11 on Alexa’s UK list, Amazon is the top ecommerce site behind search giants Google, Yahoo and Windows Live, and behind Facebook and things like BBC online and Wikipedia. All of which are not normal ecommerce sites. Amazon has a massive multinational customer base with, in the US, nearly three times the internet sales revenue of its nearest competitor Staples. Amazon can teach us that constantly diversifying your product base and never sitting on your laurels will keep your business profitable and ahead of the curve.
eBay sits at no.8 on Alexa’s list. Now while it is not necessarily always making profit for itself through selling items it certainly turns a healthy profit through an ‘insertion fee’ for every item users submit for auction. It must have done having purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion. Ingenuity eBay teaches us, is the key to making money online. When eBay first launched in 1995, it for a long while had a veritable monopoly on the genre until people caught up.
While these are the two biggest direct online retailers, the likes of Google, Facebook and Yahoo all make an even healthier profit by selling services, links and advertising. Is this a sign of the times that to make money online, selling goods is a less lucrative option? If you are trying to beat the top dogs then yes. But if you are a normal business with good products then online selling is still by far the best option.
Martin Able is an established team member at the payment service provider Lancore and has a wealth of experience in secure and reliable money transfer services.
