James VanDyke

OTB only offers one product per category.

Have you ever walked into a consumer electronics store only to be overwhelmed by all of the choices?

I have.

You want to spend your money wisely.  But,  this sea of products seems to ensure you can never be certain about your purchase.  If you’re like me, you probably walk away from your purchasing experience frustrated.

Research tells us that in order to compensate for vast array of choices the average consumer now spends 12 hours researching online for each consumer electronics purchase.

OTB is a retail website that sells a single best-in-category product in popular consumer electronics categories. By researching and selecting only the best products, OTB guarantees consumers will make a great purchase.

For example if you visit the OTB website looking for a digital camera, the only camera you’ll find is the Canon PowerShot SD1100. OTB has done the research for you. All you do is click buy.

In addition OTB will build strong relationships with it’s consumers by providing the most comprehensive information on our products and suggesting complementary products. These additional services will
ensure that OTB continues to provide value to the consumer even after the purchase.

What do you think?

So, there is the core of my business idea. Let me know what you think in the comments. We’ll look at some of the numbers supporting the concept in the next post.

My first task for my “Starting a Business” class was to think of a business I wanted to work on for the entire semester. I brainstormed for about a week and half about potential ideas. I found the most useful formula for plausible ideas came from combining three things:

• Something I’m interested in
• Something I know how to do (or at least have a clue about)
• Something that people will pay for

In the end I settled on an e-commerce website that sells consumer electronics. I’ve always been interested in gadgets and gizmos so consumer electronics matched that interest. A large part of my current job can be categorised as “web stuff”. While my skills are much more refined on the marketing and content side, I understand the programming side enough to be dangerous. So, creating an e-commerce website isn’t too much of a stretch for the something I know how to do category. In order to figure out something people would pay for I needed to find a good angle about purchasing consumer electronics. We’ll explore that in the next post.

I’m getting an MBA at night and this past semester I took a class called Starting a Business. The bulk of our work focused on writing a business plan for a theoretical business that we might start. Since I put a good deal of work into the class I thought I would share over the next few posts some of the ideas and thoughts behind this idea.