No Money Down Making e-commerce as free as can be

One of the first lessons of life is that there's no suchthing as free. Yet the Internet always seems to be on the verge ofmaking that rule as obsolete as a 300-baud modem. Here, after all,is where all sorts of stuff costs nothing beyond the usual$20-a-month access fee--zillions of Web pages crammed with text andgraphics, numberless discussion groups, blazingly fast searchengines, lifetime e-mail accounts, even inter-national telephonecalls.

But surely e-commerce capabilities cost something, right? Theydid until July, when Bigstep.com began offering to get masses ofsmall businesses on the Web for almost nothing. That includesdisplaying catalogs, taking orders, publishing customernewsletters, analyzing Web activity, building relationships and alot more that small businesses couldn't afford before.

Having seen the success Web-based community sites such asGeo-Cities and Xoom have had in hosting individuals' Web sites,Bigstep set out to apply essentially the same business model toe-commerce. "Big businesses were benefiting [from e-commerce]a great deal," says Andrew Beebe, 27, Bigstep's CEO andco-founder, "[but] there were a lot of people who were aboutto be left out."