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Music You Can't Download
As the body count mounts among venture capital-backed "e-tailers", followers of the new economy may wonder whether anyone is making money selling to consumers online. In fact, many small businesses operating with small overheads in well-defined niche markets are yielding strong profits.
One of them is Ellicott City - based Coast to Coast Music, which is selling
thousands of dollars per month worth of....harmonicas. That is, over 150 kinds of harmonicas -- along with instructional materials, accessories, pennywhistles, recorders, and various other folk instruments as well as guitar instruction and accessories, a total of over 300 music related products. There's a whole world of blues harp music out there, and large numbers of the aficionados have found one another online.
Coast to Coast Music is at the center of this community, with its own discussion forums, links to other sites, and tie-ins for people who want to link their own sites to community bulletin boards. Owner John Watts, a home remodeling contractor in his nonvirtual life, began playing the harmonica in 1996. To pay for lessons, he offered to sell his teacher's instructional tapes from a Web site, creating an online order form to be printed out and mailed with a check. (He still sells these tapes
and CDs of his instructor, Doug Puls, who is a partner in Coast to Coast Music.) Over time, he added a steadily growing range of harmonica products.
A big break came in 1998, when an IT executive at Dell Computer decided to liven up a national Dell meeting in Austin by purchasing 1,300 harmonicas -- and inviting Mr. Puls and Mr. Watts to teach a class of over 800 IT professionals to play harmonica blues.
Building a Fully-Equipped e-Store for Free with Freemerchant.com
In December 1999, Mr. Watts added real-time credit card processing capability on a secure server by building an online catalogue for free on Freemerchant.com's safeshopper domain. Sales immediately doubled.
"And immediately after adding the secure server, my customer base went from 10% female to 50%,"
he notes wryly. "Apparently, women are more concerned about -- and savvy about -- online security than men."
By this point, Mr. Watts had built a natural
"viral marketing" base, participating in two online newsgroups for harmonica enthusiasts and starting his own community as well. He has also worked to make his site an information center and a community hub -- offering free instructional tips and two new online discussion forums, HarpTalk and GuitarTalk.
Other Freemerchant features that helped to grow Coast to Coast Music were the unlimited free catalogue space and the ease with which multiple products could be added. "It was particularly important for me to be able to use multiple SKUs for one product, since we offer many harmonica models in twelve or more keys," Mr. Watts explains.
Founded in Dec. 1998, Freemerchant.com was the Internet's first and remains the best free e-commerce platform. Host to over 75,000 small e-businesses, Freemerchant offers free automated e-store building with unlimited catalogue space, free hosting and free back-office support software. Freemerchant has been ranked tops among free ecommerce platforms by PC Computing (now Smart Business), PC Magazine, Internet.com, and Cahners In-Stat. Links to reviews are below, along with analyst references.
Reviews:
PC Computing (Smart Business) 5-star review, 2/2000
PC Magazine's Editor's Choice, "Setting up Shop Online"
Internet.com 5-Star review, "E-Commerce Guide" |
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