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27 January 2001, France

Dear Dr. Ecommerce,

I'm a young student from France. My teacher has given me homework recently, which was to ask you a few questions. I would REALLY appreciate it if You could help me with this. I'm going to start a renting business over the Internet. There are a few points which I'm not so sure about:

1. What kind of things can I rent out to people over the Net? Are there any restrictions (i.e. renting people for keeping a company to someone)?

2. What would be your advice about a good domain name?

3. Like I said I live in France, can I rent things to people overseas? What about international restrictions?

4. Can a customer refuse to pay if he doesn't like the thing he ordered? He only saw it here, on the Internet, but he discovers there is something wrong with this thing in reality.

5. Are Internet companies really cheaper when it comes to paying taxes?

You will save my life if you could just shortly answer the above
questions. Thanks in advance,

Agnes

Dear Agnes:

SAVE YOUR LIFE!?! Good lord, you must have a cruel teacher!

1. If you can rent something to people via traditional means, you can rent it to them via e-commerce. You would need to check legal restrictions regarding renting goods or services in your target markets to see if there are any restrictions.

2. In the past, people thought generic names like, "garden.com", "furniture.com", "drugs.com", etc, were ideal. They believed that these would be most effective because when people wanted, for example, garden products, they would immediately type "www.garden.com" into their browsers. In fact this hasn't worked and all of my examples above as well as many other companies with generic domain names have run into serious problems or have closed their virtual doors permanently. A big reason for this is that a generic name has no brand identity. People develop no attachment to generic names, but they do develop attachments to brand names. Given a choice, most fashion conscious people would probably prefer to shop for Calvin Klein, Versace, Dior, Gucci, etc, rather than for something at clothes.com. Hence it is important to devise a suitable name that you can get excited about - and that your customers can get excited about. It should be reasonably short and easy to spell. If your target market is entirely in France, then stick with a yourdomain.fr domain name. If you are selling globally, then you will want a .com name. This is trickier because so many dot-com domain names have been taken. Nevertheless, with a bit of imagination you can certainly come up with a cool French name.

3. You can rent things to people overseas provided you don't break any laws within your customers' countries. The biggest problem is likely to be the logistics of sending something to people temporarily - for the rental period - and then getting it back again. But if this is possible with your rental product or service, you should be okay.

4. If the customer is a consumer in Europe, she has seven days to back out of a contract without giving a reason. In other words, she can refuse your product or service and is legally entitled to a refund. Furthermore, many credit card companies will do chargebacks if their customers complain about an on-line purchases. For example, if a customer purchases, or rents, something and is dissatisfied, she can usually complain to her credit card company and get a refund. The credit card company will then claim the money back from the merchant - together with a chargeback fine in many cases. The credit card companies usually allow a much longer period than seven days to do a chargeback.

5. No.

I hope this saves your life.

Good luck,

Dr. Ecommerce