Setting Up Shop E-commerce is booming. Here's how you can get in the game.

Being small and agile was one reason Holt Educational Outlet, adevelopmental-toy discount retailer, was able to initiate ane-commerce strategy relatively quickly. The 20-year-old catalogretailer in Waltham, Massachusetts, which has a warehouse that alsofunctions as a retail store, decided to delve into the Internetlast year. Unlike large companies that mire a Web project inmeetings and paperwork, president and CEO Paul Holt's50-employee firm took action quickly by hiring an executive who wasexcited about the Web site idea and ran with it.

David Lord, the company's new CFO and chief informationofficer, wanted to make Holt a major presence in theeducational-toy market on the Internet. "We redeveloped ourbusiness plan and decided that e-commerce would be our corestrategy," Lord says. "Because we wanted to compete withthe big guys and grow nationally, and because we knew we didn'thave the kind of money to invest in our own stores across thenation, we believed if we put the proper e-commerce plan in place,we might just be fast and aggressive enough to growquickly."

Lord hired a team to help run his department and implement thecompany's e-commerce strategy. The team chose Microsoft as itsmain platform and bought several state-of-the-art servers. It alsobought Microsoft e-commerce software and signed up for multiple ITphone lines, i.e. more powerful lines for faster connections.Finally, it integrated its accounting software into Microsoft'ssite server.