ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Anyone who has ever bought anything online sitting in their pajamas in bed will agree with Paula Rosenblum, managing partner at Miami-based Retail Systems Research when she identifies the main reason why people buy online: convenience.

But Rosenblum notes that this very reason means that small and midsize businesses trying to make it online need to "execute" really well if they want to survive in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

In other words, if you don't make your product as convenient as possible for the customer — if your shirts aren't true to size, if your plants aren't as healthy as you say, if your chocolate bunnies don't look like they did on the site — your company won't last.

I spoke with Rosenblum in the course of my research for an article on Bamboo Pipeline, a distributor of wholesale horticultural products.

She liked the company's Web site, saying it "frees up time" for landscape professionals who don’t want to waste their daylight hours placing plant orders.

But the tricky part is if these professionals don't get to pick out the plants themselves, Bamboo's Web site had "better be educative" (which she felt it was) and the quality of the product "needs to be high."

Her words ring true for all you budding e-commerce businesses: "It's a very different world. This whole notion of customer centricity has a practical meaning to it. The technology can support it but you need to deliver the goods. Otherwise you're worse off than if you hadn't done it all. The number one direct challenge of e-commerce is that it is true to what you say."