E-Commerce on the Cheap
A medical device company was using Chinese LEDs in their products and was so impressed with the quality and price of the LEDs that they decided to create a new company to import and sell the LEDs to others. Leading-LEDs.com was formed but the owners needed a way to create an e-commerce site at a low enough cost to justify the risk of the new start up company.

The Problem
E-commerce solutions are usually not that inexpensive. Plus there were many different types of LEDs that needed to be sold, and typically LEDs sell for pennies each, so Leading-LEDs.com didn't want to invest a lot of money before they knew there was enough volume to suport the business.

The Solution
Precision Marketing suggested the use of Paypal e-commerce which would allow a HTML site to be built but utilize Paypal's "Add to Cart" buttons as a way to add shopping cart functionality without having to pay a monthly subscription fee or have a merchant account.

To make things easy, source code was copied from the Chinese manufacturer's website, but updated to improve language and product data. The modified source code was saved on Leading-LEDs.com's webserver and the site was able to be up and running, with full shopping cart functionality within two weeks.

The site was then optimized for search engines, submitted for indexing and within a month it was showing up for various search terms related to LEDs.

Results
Leading-LEDs.com was able to have a functioning e-commerce website within a month's time that was built at a cost of less than $2,000. This low up-front investment will allow the company to see whether its business model is successful and gives them a foundation to build upon should they wish to expand or improve their Internet presence.