Reading an essay about BM, there’s a mention of a 10-15% conversion rate, which these “Entrepreneurs” argued about. But back in the early 2000s, I had an e-commerce “business” with a conversion rate of 10-13%. It was real.
We sold the internet on CD-ROM with delivery. We negotiated with website owners who had rich, often original, content to place a “Buy this site on CD” button on all their pages, created discs with downloaded pages from the content, equipped them with a search feature, and shared the profits from each disk sold. The link from the partner’s site led to a product card with related items, so many orders were for 2-3 discs. Some of the discs were live CDs with free operating systems. Payment was mostly cash on delivery. That was also when I first registered as a sole proprietor.
It was called NaDiske.Ru.
About 100-200 people visited our site from a dozen partners, and of those visitors, 10-20 would purchase discs.
We closed down because progress meant regions were diving into normal internet services (and sales were mainly in the regions), and the discs needed to be refreshed as the content became outdated.
Remember Dmitry Mottle?)
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 