Dot Dot Dot

It seems so simple. Buy a $100 Web-authoring program, pay a few more bucks for a domain name and space to put up your site, then watch out--you are on the fast track to a cool billion dollars . . . or at least a couple million. It happened at Amazon.com, eToys, Autobytel, and more e-businesses than you could click a mouse at. Except it's not that easy. "I'd say 75 percent of Web sites are inadequate; they won't succeed," says Janet Asteroff, director of e-business services with The Concours Group, a Kingwood, Texas-based e-business consulting company.

Too pessimistic? Not according to some experts. "At least 70 percent of Web sites are just up there and don't do much at all," says Wally Bock, a Wilmington, North Carolina, e-commerce consultant.

Keep talking to experts, and the general guesstimate is that at minimum, two in three e-businesses are doomed. And that's because it's just not as simple as it seems to erect a smoothly functioning Web site that makes money, too.

Robert McGarvey is Entrepreneur magazine's monthly "Web" columnist

This article was originally published in the April 2000 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Dot Dot Dot.