Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2010. It offers a 2010 snapshot: Ganga.es with more than 40,000 registered users in Spain and second place in the Spanish second-hand market, and tallaespecial.com described as a link directory. Either site may no longer exist.
From now until the end of the month we’re going to analyse the market and the businesses that are making money online today. There is still room to innovate, as we’ve discussed on other occasions. Not everything has been invented. In fact, the internet is an outlet for any business, since it lets us take our business beyond borders, and billions are currently changing hands online every day. Which businesses are profitable online?
Online, just as with high-street businesses, a good idea isn’t everything. We need to develop it and draw up a business plan, a project, and so on.
We all know eBay, and on the face of it the second-hand buying and selling business is saturated and, to some extent, monopolised by eBay. Well, that didn’t stop the founders of Ganga.es from building their own business on the eBay idea.
Obviously they haven’t knocked eBay off the top spot, but Ganga.es currently has more than 40,000 registered users in Spain alone. That figure makes it number two in this market in Spain. Their mistake was not expanding outside Spain or making one last advertising push.
Had they done a little more, they could have reached a better position in the market.
Another example of a good business idea thrown away is tallaespecial.com. It was originally meant to be a business serving people who struggle to find shoes and clothes in their size, but it ended up as a link directory that redirects you to an incredible number of shops in that line of business.
We give these two examples of online businesses to show that, in internet businesses, it’s not just a matter of building a website and waiting for customers to come in and buy. The business idea needs continuous development and, above all, you mustn’t get discouraged, which I think is what has happened to more than one online business or virtual shop.
In any case, when putting a business idea into practice online, it doesn’t matter if someone else is already doing it; it’s simply a matter of improving it, changing it, or just adding something new.
Remember that MySpace already existed when Facebook came along.
Further reading
- Business ideas for making money online
- Business ideas with social media
- The advantages and disadvantages of working from home
Featured image: Nenad Stojković, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
