There's no place like gnome
How much does a successful retailer make during the busiest season of the year? According to Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, a smidgen under 84 quid. This was average for the 140 retailers which participated in last year's E-Christmas electronic commerce site, hailed as a success by its sponsors, HP MS UPS (or Hire-Purchase Mess-Ups as the consortium will now be known).
Who, I wonder, were the 225 people who parted with an average #52 each?
Were they overworked millennium project managers with no time to nip to the shops? Or lonely Yorkshiremen who thought the site was called 'ee Christmas'?
I've spoken to a few businesses in the past year about e-commerce - including one small shopkeeper who had found the Web far more useful for solving the Mail on Sunday crossword than for peddling his wares. Most said they were spending minute amounts of time and money, and the payback was commensurate.
Only one firm had made a big splash. In two years, it has trebled its workforce, more than doubled its turnover, grown its export business from almost nothing to over half its sales, and is signing up dealers abroad.
It has restructured its product line, set up an R&D department and moved to a bigger factory, yet its main worry is keeping up with demand. Just what the world of e-commerce needs. A rip-roaring success story.
Except this company doesn't do anything prosaic, rent cars or sell shoes.
It makes garden gnomes. Or at least, the moulds from which they are cast, as well as any other concrete garden monstrosity money can buy. And it doesn't sell to consumers, but to businesses.
It could be that our European partners and Yankee cousins are crying out for stony-hearted Big Ears lookalikes. Or that foreign garden centres are extremely hi-tech (maybe they have greenfield fingers). Or perhaps the little people are ardent technofreaks (I'm told the Net is big in Ireland and Finland).
My suspicion is that it's actually because the moulds are made of latex, which shows up in search engines and pulls in passing perverts. Stopping over between the Hot Sex and Naughty Nurses sites, they decide a gnome or two would add spice to their activities. One New Zealander even asked the firm to make a mould of his girlfriend (which it didn't).
But how is anyone going to take e-commerce seriously when Microsoft and HP can only scrape together #11,700 on the Net, while a family business in Tuxford can rake in 10 times that sum?
As I see it, short of persuading Bill Gates and Lew Platt to parade themselves in latex suits, there is only one solution.
Businesses must provide products customers actually want to purchase via the Web, and aim them, at other businesses with a desire to buy. Otherwise, next autumn's E-Christmas will be called F-Christmas. Or rather, 'Effing Christmas!'
Paul Bray is a freelance IT journalist.