What Makes a Good Online Product?

Just about any product can be sold online. But let’s be quite clear; some products sell much better
than others. Let’s think about some product characteristics that both help and hurt products when
selling online:
■ Price:weight ratio The price:weight ratio needs to be high; that is the price, in
comparison to the weight, needs to be high. Books have a very high price:weight ratio—
a book might be worth, say, $30/lb. Sugar might be around 35 cents/lb. The price:weight
ratio issue is why it’s hard to sell sugar, cement, and charcoal online.
■ Availability Less available is good. Available everywhere is bad. That’s why it’s hard
to sell candy bars online.
■ Information products Products that are essentially information sell well online.
Books, reports, reference materials . . . even music is an information product, really.
Why do they do well online? Because online technology provides a very efficient way to
deliver information. It’s fast and it’s cheap. It’s no wonder that books were the first major
product category online and remain one of the primary categories.
■ Complicated products requiring research The Internet is the perfect research tool, of
course. Products that require careful selection—products with many different features—
often do well online.
■ Wide selection of specialty products An example is one of the earliest small-biz
successes, HotHotHot.com, an online success for over a decade. Sure, you can find
hot sauce in any grocery store. But can you find Jamaican Hell Fire, Rigor Mortis Hot
Sauce, 99%, or 3:00 AM? (The company provides 100 different brands.) Have you even
heard of these? Another example is RedWagons.com. Certainly you can find two or
three different Radio Flyer wagons in most toy stores, but where else can you find every
Radio Flyer product made—steel wagons, plastic wagons, trikes, scooters, retro rockets,
roadsters, and everything else?
■ Deals There’s a class of goods that crosses all classes, and even covers products that
you might think of as Not Good Internet Products. If you can sell a particular product at
a very low price, you may have a good Internet product. Hey, if you can get the price of
sugar down low enough, you might be able to sell that online.
■ “Cool” products that sell themselves through word of mouth There are some
products that are just so cool, people tell their friends. One company that gets fantastic
word of mouth is ThinkGeek.com, which sells tons of really cool stuff (Figure 1-1).
Another example of a great word-of-mouth site is Despair.com. This company sells
products that people put on their office walls and laugh about with their friends.
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