What Does It Take to Sell on the Web? A Year and $1 million

Establishing some kind of electronic commerce strategy has become an absolute priority for nearly all types of businesses. But recent studies show that the cost of just creating and maintaining a presence on the Internet can be prohibitive at times, and that the costs associated with ensuring security and reliability on a site make the price of e-commerce skyrocket even higher.

A recent study from Gartner Group Inc. estimates that the average cost of developing and launching an e-commerce presence on the Web is $1 million - a price tag that the information technology consulting group predicts will inflate by 25 percent annually over the next two years. As much as 79 percent of that cost is related to labor and time rather than technology platforms, with 10 percent being taken up by software and 11 percent by hardware. (STAT)

The study also found that the concept of instantaneous ''Internet time,'' which is so often associated with e-commerce and other Web-related initiatives, may not always apply to getting a site up and running. According to survey respondents, the average time required to complete an e-commerce site was five months, with some taking as long as a year to launch. The study focused on both retail sites selling goods and services and business-to-business e-commerce efforts.

Despite the high cost of entry and long lag times associated with e-commerce, corporate spending on Internet initiatives is still rising at a frenzied pace - and it appears to be driven primarily by e-commerce. Research and consulting firm International Data Corp. recently predicted that spending on Internet-related corporate efforts in the United States alone will jump from $85 billion in 1999 to more than $203 billion in 2002.

Jason Meyers