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Your brand can be a strong factor in whether you succeed online or not. One search at your company name or brand and a potential customer can make a decision whether to push through with buying from you or look at some other company.

Your brand is your identity. Your brand tells your customers why they should buy from you. It is what your brand connotes that makes you successful. Take a look at the world’s most successful brands and you will get an idea of why branding and protecting your brand is very important.

Brands are not just about the company logo, it is the emotional connection between your products and your customers. It is what your products are associated with. For example, Coke has been working hard to associate its beverages with fun and refreshment, while others like Louis Vuitton likes to make you think of luxury when thinking of their brands. McDonald’s, on the other hand, goes for inexpensive yet pleasant experience, while Nintendo goes for family friendly and can be suitable for the home.

The best brands are associated with great value and durability, value for money and reliability, great customer service along with a superior product.

Yet, with the advent of the Internet, your brand’s image can easily be tarnished. It could be a customer warning other people not to buy your products, or some wrong move by your company. Mattel’s Barbie has long been known to be a safe toy for children, and its image was severely tarnished when it was found that its Chinese partner used toxic chemicals, causing it to issue a toy recall involving more than 9.5 million dolls. More than this, parents all over the world avoided buying Barbie dolls until the issue died down and only after Mattel assured the public of more stringent processes to avoid the same incident in the future.

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To say that the Internet has changed the way we live our lives is an understatement. The Internet has brought people together, removing conventional boundaries like space and culture. People can now interact with somebody from halfway across the globe with a touch of a single button. And that change has encompassed every aspect of life, from personal and social interactions, to the way we communicate, and ultimately the way we do business.

The Internet’s impact on retail markets is a good example of the change as far as business is concerned. Traditional markets are limited by time and space, where merchants and traders could only sell to people who are physically in their stores and pay for it on location. When the Internet first came, the few and far more progressive retailers took their products to the Web by showcasing it in an online catalog. Order fulfillment and payment remained inside the store premises. And then e-tailers like books giant Amazon came along and led the way for e-commerce. With the advancements in technology and security, more and more brick and mortars launched their own Web sites that enabled them to sell 24 hours a day, to anyone in the planet.

The first retailers to take business to the Internet soon found themselves with a marketing tool that augmented their sales. Their Web sites became a branch that was open all night, and could take orders that they can fulfill anytime they want. It was a new marketplace for them, and one that provided unlimited possibilities. Consumers, on the other hand, benefited from the sudden influx of information. They are now able to compare products, services, prices, specifications, even "sample" the products online. Not to mention being free from the hassles of looking for a parking lot in stores. The added convenience derived through online shopping boosted Internet sales year after year. This is a market that topped more than $25 billion in sales just for December 2008 alone, and that’s during a recession and a downtrend.

The Internet is constantly evolving and along with this evolution comes the changes that are currently being seen in e-tailing. More and more companies are now seeing their e-commerce operations as not just sales and marketing tool, but part of their market development and are weaved into business strategies. The e-tailers realized that to be on top of today’s e-tail industry, one should offer the best service, the most information, and more hassle-free and complete online shopping experience. They had to strengthen communication mediums and distribution channels. In short, offer new products or services, significant improvement over existing ones, target new customers, and implement certain strategies relevant to their markets.

All these just prove that the customer is the king.

The path leading toward profitable growth online is, apparently, thick with mosses of false impressions – others would call them “dangerous half-truths.” With a “Yes, but…” approach, let us count the ways that might prove to be our own undoings (according to management and strategy experts):

The “First-Mover Advantage”
In Internet business, first-mover status is a shaky ground on which to rests strategy. There is called ‘the limits of preemption’ where later entrants can persuade buyers to switch by offering better products and services. If the market is insufficiently ordered, the first entrant may be too early. When “launchers” try either to expressly manipulate the standard or monopolize, potential users likely will resist getting trapped.

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