Can I Have A Copy Of Ebay, For £50?

This is a favourite one and one that I mention to many customers to focus them on their website marketing. I also mentioned it in one of my early posts.

Quite simply, a customer gets in contact and wants 'a copy of Ebay for £50, please'. I don't know whether these people think copying a website is like copying a CD - done in seconds, quite easily, but creating a website that is a copy of Ebay would take either buying a template of such an auction site, or creating it from scratch.

And why always for £50? These are obviously people desperate to throw a small amount of cash into a venture and turn out a huge profit. But, as I said recently, if making huge sums of cash from such small, easy to publish, websites was possible, wouldn't webdesigners be doing that themsleves, rather than working for customers?

These small ideas are great, and many will work. Think of ideas like Friends Reunited, Facebook etc. All easy to do, all simple ideas. But there one big thing missing in quite a lot of cases. The marketing. I could put together a site like Facebook quite easily, but the problem is always spending the time and effort getting the site known. That's the big point. And it's likely that if you are cloning a major site for a pittance that you haven't got the cash to market it properly. And if that sort of person contacts me, I prefer to try to persuade them to think of a more suitable idea rather than take their cash for something I doubt will work.

There are many copies of Ebay out there, but there's only 1 Ebay. Think of a new idea, contact a web designer and get your thinking hat on to make sure that plenty of people hear about your site!