Small Businesse-CommercePortals

On the Internet, small businesses have become bigbusiness, and areally bigbusiness, Microsoft, wants apiece of the action. The company's Small Business Center(www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness) is one of manysites offering advice and services for small businessesmoving online. Most features, whether free or paid, arewhat you'd expect: lots of links and information along thelines established by Prodigy Biz (www.prodigybiz.com)or Entrabase.com. Small Business Center, however,stands out for its affordable advertising and marketingservices.

One program helps businesses create banner adsand places them on a collection of Web sites that itclaims are visited by 60 percent of the Web surfingcommunity. With its "Banner Network Ads" program,buyers don't pay a huge fee upfront, and they don't runthe risk that a huge number of visitors will unexpectedlydrive up click through commissions. Instead, this programallows small business to pay a small, fixed fee for aguaranteed number of clickthrough (people who clickon your banner ad to visit your Web site). Small BusinessCenter rotates these banner ads around a networkof participating Web sites and removes the ad as soon asit has received the guaranteed number of clickthroughvisitors. This action eliminates the guesswork regardingboth traffic and fees. The three packages100, 250,and 1,000 visitorsbreak down to 50 cents per visitor.

Answer the following questions:

a.Check out Small Business Center and the othere-commerce portals mentioned. Identify severalbenefits and limitations for a business using theseWeb sites.

b.Which Web site is your favorite? Why?

c.Which site would you recommend or use to help asmall business wanting to get into e-commerce?Why?