Paying Online – Should you pay for anything on the ‘Net?
A thought – huh! Paying Online?
The obvious answer is Yes – if it is worth it, but look a little deeper and the question starts to dissolve into a far more complex concept and into a direction that is far less transparent than it first appears.
You’re a small business – everyone’s saying go online, get a website, ‘do’ email, perhaps even send newsletters, i.e. market yourself online. It’s free, cheaper or cheaper than traditional methods such as office or shop space, advertising and so on.
But who are the winners here… When it comes to paying online it seems to me that Hardware companies are doing well’ish’, you do need a computer, you will always need a monitor and probably a hard drive. So stick and stones do well, you need hardware and that has to be renewed with the ‘latest’ kit periodically. That’s a clear business model, despite falling prices.
Software – sort of makes sense, but demand is collapsing within the industry as we move away from the ‘packaged’ CDs to more Agile and cheaper Apps. Apps are little snippet or mini-programs you might use for specific jobs, so rather than spending £’00s on a full program, you might spend £4.99 on an App. There is a future here, but software companies are struggling to stay relevant and competition is extremely fierce, think Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Google.
On-line – with the vast variety of freebie services, just what is going on. Any program you care to pay for offline can probably be found online for no cost. Any program you might pay for online can probably be found for nothing somewhere else – it’s an extraordinary situation at the moment. From large complex Office Software to small snippet marketing tools – it’s possible to find it for free. Let’s look at something obvious.
Google Analytics: it a fabulous piece of kit to track your website visitors, you can see how many people visit, what they do, where they spend time, how often they come, where they come from and so on and on. A/B testing The list is remarkable. Most people can benefit massively from this, so why would you pay for it.
There are plenty of ‘paid’ tools out there that claim better and more detailed information, but since I don’t subscribe to any I can’t really make comments, other than I have yet to meet the ceiling of my requirements with Google Analytics. Does that make sense?
I suspect the answer is that if a website was proactive, responding genuinely to customer needs on a day to day system them it would make sense to pay for something that gave more answers. But how many websites can and really do this. Look at Amazon – do they really serve up special offers for Kettles, just because that hour more people are looking for kettles than anything else, does EasyJet promote a weekend break to Prague on the basis that people this particular weekend are more likely to want to go to Prague. I doubt it. I honestly do. You may have a huge team of website designers, but they have the jobs to do, everything has to be authorised, signed off, checked… it takes time. I’d love to know what happens in these large companies that can ‘afford’ often exorbitant prices for little increased functionality.
Another example might be something more – ahem – time-saving – so you’re marketing online, you’re using some form of Pay-per-Click advertising, you Twittering, your Facebooking, your do all that you can. Suddenly a service like www.hootsuite.com comes along, and you’re able to manage a huge chunk of your efforts through a single entity. That is a huge time saving and really ought to be paid for. But you don’t do it.
Why not? The answer really is that it’s not actually worth it. You’re busy, you may or may not have time to do all that you need to do, inherently you feel the ‘Net should be free and basically there are other ways to do what you’re trying to achieve.
And that’s the way it seems to me it’s going to stay, Google Analytics will continue bit by bit to improve, there will be other free ways to manage your marketing and basically, the question comes around once again… paying online? why pay for it when it can be done for free.
If anyone has the answer please feel free to comment – or I might start charging and you can comment somewhere else on another website. I go back to my original sentiments, Hardware I can understand, Software is highly competitive and the more it moves on-line the more software companies will struggle, on-line and the case of paying becomes very difficult indeed.