February 2021 | Przegląd Piekarski i Cukierniczy (Baking and Confectionery Review)
The internet has changed the world. In internet selling one does not have to rent a shop or have a full warehouse. Practically all traditional costs fall away, and bakeries and confectioners’ shops can easily expand the area of their sales. The use of modern packaging and the spread of internet selling, especially in the months of the pandemic, gives the possibility of gaining new markets and new customers. A bakery can of course expand its sales offer to include internet selling for local customers. Stationary customers should be informed about the new possibilities.
The internet and courier post give enormous, indeed unlimited, possibilities for the expansion of goods. Sophisticated cakes and bread with an extended shelf life can be sold in places hundreds of kilometres away from the bakery. Unique products can be sold even abroad. An internet shop is best for this.
Everyone who has begun their adventure with the network knows that the greatest barrier to success in virtual business is one’s position in the Google search ranking. Apart from this problem, everything is simple, easy and pleasant. And thus we have arrived at the heart of the value of e-commerce companies. It is the domain – in other words the internet address – which is of fundamental importance for the success of activity in the network. If an internet address has a high position in the Google search ranking, its value is priceless. In other words, we may have the best biscuits and cakes, the most wonderful bread and baked goods, but if we do not have a high position in the search ranking our product will not be found by customers.
W-MOSZCZYNSKI ppic 2-21One has to work for a high position for many years, and it is not ordinary work but the posting of a great deal of very substantive information, maintaining intensive relations with buyers, gaining their likes and good opinions, and performing many other activities which make us credible in the eyes of Google’s algorithms.
This is not a typical occupation for bakers or confectioners. So how can one quickly gain an appropriate position and begin selling products on the internet?
Products can be sold on Allegro or OLX, but having one’s own internet shop will always be a better solution. There is only one way for this shop to be popular straight away.
But how is this to be done? How does one buy a virtual shop? Those who create such internet shops know many ways which allow them to achieve a high position in search engine rankings. The simplest is the use of hundreds of accounts and websites. This is a way of deceiving the algorithms, which are unable to distinguish real from fictitious users in the network.
Internet entrepreneurs, when selling their virtual shops, proceed similarly to the way their colleagues from the real world do. They value them on the basis of income, put them up for sale, sell them and receive the money. So much for the similarities. Buying virtual shops is like swimming in fog. We cannot touch anything, physically nothing can be seen, we have only the readings from internet statistics, which we have to believe. Walking in fog may end in various ways, especially when the seller has the possibility of adjusting the statistics. We may simply be deceived, just as the algorithms of Google’s supercomputers will be deceived.
Below I have set out a few tips which may protect us from failure when buying an internet shop.
Untrue revenues
The virtual shop which we want to buy is a shop with sweets, cakes, gateaux and bread. It is obvious that we have to buy a shop which should at least partly be thematically connected with our product range. As in the real world, a virtual shop can be assessed thanks to the revenues which it generates from sales.
An internet company can be run off the books; it can also be run abroad. As regards trading companies run in Poland, cash registers come to our aid here. Thanks to them turnover can be credibly estimated. It is worse with other kinds of activity; then we have to trust the seller, who may simply deceive us. Some people, when assessing sites, make use of Google’s benchmarking indicators. In my opinion this is an unreliable road.
Plagiarism
As I have already mentioned, a domain’s position in the Google search ranking often depends on the substantive content contained in the site. Websites develop thanks to the interest which interesting and valuable content attracts. The users themselves begin to write on the site, take part in forums, post comments. The problem is that forums may be fictitiously fabricated by the site’s administrator. The substantive content of the site and active blogs may, thanks to appropriate software, be continuously stolen from other sites.
Plagiarism is prosecuted in Poland similarly to common theft. After plagiarism is detected, in the best case the site will lose all its content and only a skeleton will remain of it, which will translate directly into its position in the ranking.
Competing with the site’s former owner
The site’s former owner may start up an internet business anew. They know the market, they know SEO tricks, they know what the ways of increasing a domain’s popularity are. They may, even before the sale, change the access code to the site so that part of the traffic is directed elsewhere. We are speaking here of a virtual world in which people are represented by beams of electrons. This is a great threat when buying internet shops, because in practice every non-competition clause can be circumvented by moving the business abroad.
The costs of maintaining the site
An internet shop’s site, like every technical device, requires technical supervision. An internet company is valued, similarly to a real one, by a multiple of its cash flows. Even if we are certain about the level of revenues, it is not known what the value of the costs is. The costs of technical maintenance for the present owner may be zero, because he himself, as administrator, has the appropriate knowledge and tools. The new owner, the owner of a bakery or confectioner’s shop, may be forced to make use of the expensive services of programmers and webmasters, which may significantly affect the profitability of the new undertaking.
Buying an internet site resembles swimming in fog. Beneath the surface of the ocean dangers lurk, and the safety of the crew depends only on the captain’s vigilance.
Wojciech Moszczyński
Wojciech Moszczyński — graduate of the Department of Econometrics and Statistics of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; specialist in econometrics, finance, data science, and management accounting. He specializes in the optimization of production and logistics processes. He conducts research in the area of the development and application of artificial intelligence. For years he has been engaged in the popularization of machine learning and data science in business environments.
Dodaj komentarz