Once upon a time, a lady named Penny Pincher owned a brick-and-mortar store. She sold a niche product to an underserved area, and her store was profitable and growing quickly.

Penny saw the tremendous opportunity in opening an online store and selling to a worldwide market. She went to Web Stores R Us for a bid, but after they scoped the work and provided an estimate, she gasped. “This price is too high!” she said.

So Penny went to the Web firm of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe. They offered to build a full-fledged e-commerce site for Penny for only $895. “What luck!” thought Penny. “THIS price is just right.” By hiring DCH, Penny saved thousands in up-front costs. Penny congratulated herself on how smart she was.

Several months later, DCH finally delivered a site. After it had been online for a while, Penny was as pleased as can be, except for a few nagging issues.

• Penny could not update any of the products without breaking the site completely.
• Penny had yet to get any sales from the site.
• Penny’s site did not show up in Google at all, even when she typed her company name into the search bar.
• Many pages took over a minute to load.
• Dewey, Cheatem & Howe were no longer returning phone calls or emails.

After a while, Penny returned to Web Stores R Us and asked for help. They took a close look at her market opportunity, and determined that her site was costing her more than $30,000 per year in lost profits.

Penny cried like a little girl.

Then she regrouped and engaged with Webstores R Us. They built her a much more robust site in a fraction of the time, and soon Penny was earning five figures per month from online sales.

Penny heaved a sigh of relief. “Wow,” she said to no one in particular, “that ‘bargain’ site sure did cost me a lot of money!”

Photo courtesy of Gumdropgas