Of course, when you’re a diversified industrial giant counting Kelsey Grammer, famed for his sitcom “Frazier,” as one your employees (GE owns NBC among a myriad of other holdings), you’re in a much different game than the rest of us.

Even so, spend a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking some serious, mind-bending cash outlays, even if the game you’re playing is Monopoly.
During these fiscally austere times there seems to be a new rallying cry for some businesses: “Spend to save.” That certainly is the management strategy that General Electric CEO Jack Welch is embracing.

“You won’t see one ounce of slowdown in tech spending from us,” he boldly stated in a television interview this year. “We are driving the hell out of IT spending.”

Good for GE, but back in the “real world” most of us are trying to make the best of slow downs and belt-tightening budgets. So scraping together a spare billion dollars to fulfill our New Economy business strategy gets a bit tricky.

Fear not, you don’t need GE’s deep pockets or its high-tech aspirations to be an online player. Thanks to Microsoft’s bCentral Business Web Services (www.bcentral.com) you can join the fray for as little as $30 a month.

Not only is the service cheap, it’s easy to set up and manage the resulting e-commerce site, especially if you have little or no technical expertise on staff. That alone can save you a bundle in getting your business up and running on the Web. And even if you’re already on the Web, bCentral can help simplify your operations.

At bCentral you can subscribe to several e-commerce services. Business Web Services helps you establish and register your domain name, create Web pages, sell products online and track customer orders. It also provides one e-mail address, 40MB of storage for your pages and unlimited data transfers.

A real plus, besides the price, is that the whole process is fairly painless. When you sign up you’ll build Web pages in the Site Manager tool. The Site Manager is a form-based, online site design and editing tool that lets you create your site without the need for programming or technical skills. The main links, such as Add a New Page, Edit A Page, and so on, are easy to navigate and the data-entry fields are self-explanatory.

The Site Manager also lets you pick your site’s design, which is then applied to all of your pages. This gives you a consistent, professional look. The best part is that you can preview the 55 themes before applying one for your site.

Creating an online catalog is simple. You can add a product to your store by picking the category in which it belongs and filling out the data-entry fields. If you have an existing catalog you can upload it if it’s an Excel spreadsheet.

It gets better. The built-in Order Manager calculates product totals, taxes and shipping charges for you. What’s more, you can accept credit cards online or process them offline yourself. The site will even send a confirmation e-mail when an order is placed and another one when you’ve shipped the product.

Other features include Traffic Builder, which is a search-engine submission tool, and List Builder, which enables you to send e-mail newsletters to customers. Even if you go with the total package of services you’ll only spend $114.80 per month or $1,068.85 a year.

With all your savings you can buy other things for the office, like light bulbs. Online. I’m sure GE will appreciate the business.




POSTED ON: 8/1/2001