Internet startup
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A dot-com company, or simply a dot-com (alternatively rendered dot.com, dot com or .com), is a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain ".com" (in turn derived from the word "commercial").
While the term can refer to present-day companies, it is also used specifically to refer to companies with this business model that came into being during the late 1990s. Many such startups were formed to take advantage of the surplus of venture capital funding. Many were launched with very thin business plans, sometimes with nothing more than an idea and a catchy name. The stated goal was often to "get big fast", i.e. to capture a majority share of whatever market was being entered. The exit strategy usually included an IPO and a large payoff for the founders. Others were existing companies that re-styled themselves as Internet companies, many of them legally changing their names to incorporate a .com suffix.
With the around the year 2000 that ended the dot-com bubble, many failed and failing dot-com companies were referred to punningly as dot-bombs,dot-cons or dot-gones. Many of the surviving firms dropped the .com suffix from their names.
In the late 1990s many businesses were interested in investing in the Internet to expand their market. The Internet has the ability to reach out to consumers globally as well as providing more convenient shopping to the consumer. If planned and executed correctly, the Internet can greatly improve sales. However, there were many businesses in the early 2000s (decade) that did not plan correctly and that cost them their business.
One of the biggest mistakes early dot-com businesses made was that they were more interested in attracting visitors to their website but not necessarily winning customers over. Early e-commerce thought the most important factor was to have as many visitors as possible gather to their website and this would eventually translate into profits for their business. This was not necessarily the case and businesses failed. Early dot-com businesses also failed to take the time to properly research the situation before starting their businesses. There are many factors that come into play when starting a new business. Research needs to go into the product the business is actually trying to sell. The business also needs to research a price for their product. They need to be competitive with the cost of their product compared to their competitors. Early businesses failed to research how they promoted their product. If they decided to advertise their product only through the cheapest avenues (i.e. banner ads, radio), then most likely they would not get the amount of consumers they would if they advertised through more popular means.
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