From Ecommerce to Social?

Shifting a site's focus to a social setting.

[Novus]

So, we have a small poorly built ecommerce site, but we do an awful lot of business through some major shopping sites, sites that we could not compete against. Some people here are now questioning whether we should even try to compete.

This got me to thinking about other web opportunities, instead of an ecommerce site in direct competition why not look at a more social option a portal/informational site feeding traffic to our content on the major shopping networks. A site with social integration, blogs, forums, user generated content, trailers, music clips etc.

I see this as an option, but a time consuming more risky one. I also had the though of offering premium content at a subscription fee and of course there always the potential for advertising revenue depending on how successful we are.

I think an ecommerce will always be the safe bet between the two. I’m wondering if there is any merit in the idea of shifting focus to a more social setting?

[httpwebwitch]

hmm... do you have the resources to do both?

Question 1: why is your e-commerce site poorly built?

Question 2: does running your own e-commerce site make sense on the bottom line? Do you in fact earn more by using it, per sale, accounting for the cost of running it, than using the services offered by those "major" shopping sites?

Don't feel bad about having a very small % of a pie, if that pie is huge.

[Novus]

It's legacy issue, I've mentioned it one or two times on the forum, the company I work basically "purchased a poor quality site a few years back" spent a lot money on a poor site (prior to my appointment) Now I’m stuck with it. It’s always been a side venture (a nice to have) it’s never been a focus of the business, luckily we don’t rely upon it.

However we have been discussing where to go from here, new build, different focus etc… so there have been a few questions asked recently, one of which was “why compete when we don’t have to, might it be better to support our product on these shopping sites/networks?”

Either way I can see some sort of new build its just what direction we head in. Generally we dont have resources to do both, i bounce between two different jobs here.