Remember when you used to go the store to buy shampoo? There were several brands, but not too many options--after all, you just wanted to wash your hair. Today each of the big shampoo manufacturers produce products for oily hair, dry hair, normal hair, long hair, short hair, dyed hair, and more other types of hair than I can name.

This is what is called market stratification. It happens in all maturing markets. The internet is a rapidly maturing market.

Do the math.

In addition to the traditional market forces that incite stratification, the internet has the added influence of search engines. Google and its brethren strive to discern which web sites are the most relevant to a user's query. One of the most common queries happens to be, "buy widgets". You can of course replace "widgets" with "golf clubs", "tents", "flashlights", or just about anything else bought or sold on the web.

The point is that a web site with 100,000 miscellaneous items is less relevant for any specific type of item than a site that specializes in that particular type of item. If your web site sells tennis rackets and only tennis rackets, all things being equal your site will tend to return higher in search results than WalMart.com. There are lots of ways to screw that up, but we can help you avoid that.

On the web, you can compete with the big boys by staking your claim to every niche you can logically serve. The more the better.

Historically, companies have resisted this because it is both expensive and a logistical nightmare... it is hard enough to create one e-commerce site, let alone half a dozen! How do you synchronize pricing and policies and handle order processing and accounting and... the list of objections can be long and loud.

Unless, of course, Digital Provisioners is serving each web site from a common architecture.

On our platform, you will see that each niche web site is more like a distinctive room in your house--and not at all like a different house in a different part of the world.

Digital Provisioners can help you develop a scalable web presence that grows in multiple directions: You can scale horizontally by creating niche sites that target distinct subsets of your markets, and you can scale vertically by increasing the depth and visibility of each site. Most importantly, your entire ecommerce empire will stay integrated and easy to manage.

Not-so-incidentally, in addition to advocating niche stores, we also believe in creating web sites dedicated to selling a single product: You can't get more niche than that. Nothing truly sells as well on the internet as a dedicated sales page, and if you create these mini-sites for your most valuable products, you can potentially have three slots in search engine results--your sales page, your niche catalog, and your primary catalog.

In a very real sense, you're overwhelming the competition.

We can help with sales pages. Ross is a bit of an expert and is the author of a popular e-book, Sales Copy Confidential. You can check it out here.

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