EU or E-Commerce

by Dr Tony Berg

Bargain-hunters have been blocked from buying cheap booze and cigarettes over the Internet following a landmark EU ruling. 200 Latvian cigarettes would have been subject to local duty of only £7.20 instead of the £50 collected in the UK.

Until the last minute the ruling had been expected to go the other way.

In preparation for a positive ruling, BBC 5 Live news decided to investigate how e-commerce might be used to exploit the new situation.

Their reporter, Stephen Chittenden, went to Prague to find a co-operative tobacconist prepared to handle small shipments to the UK.

He then came to Realnet to look into how he might set up an e-commerce website. He chose czechfags.co.uk as a domain name, which we confirmed was available and that we could register it for him.

We advised him that his approach would work but that as with all web solutions it would need to be well engineered to be effective.

Google has set the ground rules for successful websites – if you are not found easily in Google then there is little to be gained by building an e-commerce solution for our tobacconist in Prague.

Stephen found our website on Google and came to Realnet for advice.

Being found in Google is paramount, but with an increasingly sophisticated online population the e-commerce solution he wanted has to be more than simply easily found. It has to be a complete solution that is well engineered to be fast and easy to use.

Dr Tony Berg
Managing Director - Realnet Ltd
tonyberg@realnet.co.uk

Article originally published in Cambridge Network Connection magazine Issue 24, 05/12/2006.

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