According to online business practitioners, initial investment outlays, a strategic plan or effective online marketing are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the challenges awaiting those starting out in e-business.
The fact that this is not a simple and pleasant road to success is confirmed by, among others, the conclusions of a report by the company Copyblogger – The Cost of Online Business, which shows that 48% of surveyed online entrepreneurs barely "make ends meet," while only 23% admit to fully satisfactory results from their operations. The best approach, however, is to confront research firms' findings with reality by asking business practitioners online about the toughest challenges on their completely different paths – one leads through the world of e-commerce, the other through blogging.
A piece of one's own world
The travel bloggers, Jakub and Anna Górniccy, have already traveled almost the entire world far and wide, sharing their unique experiences with fans of their blog, which has already gathered more than 37 thousand likes on Facebook and taken first place in a poll of travel blogs organized by Press magazine. After selecting the "Countries" tab, visitors are greeted with a choice of hundreds of entries from 36 countries around the world. They themselves describe their mission as delivering content that combines travel, culture and technology. As Jakub Górnicki admits, in their case a great deal depends on the latter.
- For us, the responsiveness of our blog is one of the most important factors, because looking at the current rules for sharing content online, we know from the outset that our materials are too large. No wonder, since travel is primarily photos, videos, and in our case also multimedia stories. We consciously give up some speed in favor of quality, but wherever we can, we try to improve it. The latest changes to the template, in cooperation with our hosting provider, drastically improved the blog's performance - without any loss in the quality of the content we publish – adds Jakub Górnicki.
The sizable number of followers naturally curious about the world and further reports from its most distant corners means that the Górnickis' portal often has to cope with a real influx of visitors. This is not an isolated affliction, either – problems handling excessive traffic are regularly experienced by e-commerce platforms during shopping seasons or public institution websites during hot periods, an example of which can easily be the failure of services run by environmental monitoring organizations caused by a very dynamic increase in the number of visits in connection with a smog alert.
- The main traffic is generated by multimedia stories. And they are precisely the ideal "tester" of our blog's maintenance service. Generally, hosting providers' solutions scale resources quite easily when a given site is characterized by stable interest. However, it is sudden spikes in visits that show whether the technology is ready to handle significant interest or not. For me, that was the main factor in deciding to move to flexible web hosting. Before we decided on migration, I described the specifics of our work to the consultants in detail and we talked for a long time about whether we could manage. So far, without jinxing it, it is going very well and we have managed, without any technical mishaps, to share digital memories from hundreds of trips taken so far – explains Jakub Górnicki.
In e-commerce you cannot overpay
According to Kamil Puchowski, CEO of the service konsoleigry.pl, taking the first steps in e-business involves two overriding challenges – ensuring effective internet marketing and finding a cost-optimized place to locate one's website online.
- When moving our business online, we opted for a dedicated server. Quite quickly, however, we found out that this was not the best move. While we managed to build an experienced team of marketers, this type of website maintenance service generated costs far exceeding our expectations, and it is worth mentioning that the costs associated with maintaining an e-platform are a very important component of all costs of running this type of business – says Kamil Puchowski.
This example corresponds well with a study recently conducted by dhosting.pl on a group of online entrepreneurs, which shows that more than half of them pay at least 30% too much for services related to the maintenance and administration of websites. This is one of the main factors behind the fact that in Poland, according to GUS data, only 65% of companies have a website.
- At some point we had to decide to change our existing service, and after reviewing the market offer we chose hosting in a flexible model that automatically manages resources depending on traffic on the site and allows you to pay only for those that we actually used. In our case, finding the right hosting was therefore a greater challenge than online marketing, although in the end we managed to find a service that does not generate inflated costs – explains Kamil Puchowski.
Facing the challenges
According to the latest report by the company Clutch, the second most important reason holding small and medium-sized companies back from moving their operations online is the excessively high cost of maintaining a website – 30% of respondents gave this answer. Only 2% more said they do not intend to create a "digital face" for their enterprise because, in their opinion, it is not obligatory for the business they run.
Both customers and visitors to specialized blogs are becoming increasingly impatient, which is another, non-cost challenge for website administrators. According to data from the company Incapsula, as many as 61% of online buyers do not intend to wait longer than 5 seconds for a sales platform to load and decide to browse another e-shop's offer instead. Time matters for bloggers as well – an Aberdeen Group study proved that even one second of downtime leads to an 11% decrease in visits - the longer a portal is unavailable, the greater the decline in interest in the content being shared.
