Specifications

that sell similar things in surrounding areas. New competitors will open occasionally. With
e-commerce, the terrain is less certain.
Depending on shipping costs, your competitors could be anywhere in the world, and subject to
different currency fluctuations and labor costs. The Internet is fiercely competitive and evolv-
ing rapidly. If you are competing in a popular category, new competitors can appear every day.
There is little that you can do to eliminate the risk of competition, but, by staying abreast of
developments, you can ensure that your venture remains competitive.
Software Errors
When your business relies on software, you are vulnerable to errors in that software.
You can reduce the likelihood of critical errors by selecting software that is reliable, allowing
sufficient time to test after changing parts of your system, having a formal testing process, and
not allowing changes to be made on your live system without testing elsewhere first.
You can reduce the severity of outcomes by having up-to-date backups of all your data, keep-
ing known working software configurations when making a change, and monitoring system
operation to quickly detect problems.
Evolving Governmental Policies and Taxes
Depending on where you live, legislation relating to Internet-based businesses might be nonex-
istent, in the pipeline, or immature. This is unlikely to last. Some business models might be
threatened, regulated, or eliminated by future legislation. Taxes might be added.
You cannot avoid these issues. The only way to deal with them is to keep up-to-date with what
is happening and keep your site in line with the legislation. You might want to consider joining
any appropriate lobby groups as issues arise.
System Capacity Limits
One thing to bear in mind when designing your system is growth. Your system will hopefully
get busier and busier. It should be designed in such a way that it will scale to cope with
demand.
For limited growth, you can increase capacity by simply buying faster hardware. There is a
limit to how fast a computer you can buy. Is your software written so that after you reach this
point, you can separate parts of it to share the load on multiple systems? Can your database
handle multiple concurrent requests from different machines?
Few systems cope with massive growth effortlessly, but if you design it with scalability in
mind, you should be able to identify and eliminate bottlenecks as your customer base grows.
Running an E-commerce Site
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HAPTER 12
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RUNNING AN
E-COMMERCE SITE
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