Crowded market
Tempting isn't it? You have a product to sell, and the internets reach is global. Selling a widget in Heuston, Texas can have a market in Toronto, Beijing, Los Angeles, or London. However, any search for a product in a search engine reveals immediately what competition there is in the global sales market for any particular product or service. Other than for some peculiar requirement, the competition is intense. The reason is obvious - every business wants to expand, and the expansion is afforded easily through the web. For larger companies - if they don't at least have an online presence - remaining companies will prove difficult. Web propaganda? NO. More and more people do business or prior research for business through the web. Banking, Car sales, widget research, returns policy, store location, store opening hours, railway timetables, and much more is becoming web based. Nobody is about the pull out the connecting wires from their computers and return to a stand-alone PC. See Web-Law - Forward Only. The progression is one-way. So companies try to get their voices heard through the noise. Here's how.

Quality of the Site
It doesn't take much for visitors to get turned off any website. Broken links, misleading information, innacuries and such leads to no return visits. Many on-line news sources require a log-in. Why? For their own marketing or some similar end. Why should a visitor bother, especially with increased awareness of data privacy and the ever present problem of unwanted email? Just get the news from another web source. In a desire to monetize a site, many webmasters have turned to pop-ups, without foreseeing the irritation this causes visitors. Their later counterpart: pop-unders are only slightly less annoying. Any site that attempts to prevent it's visitors from leaving the site deserves to incur any visitors wrath - are they trying to make e-friends or e-enemies?
Think of the sites visited that left you with a good feeling. Easy links, good visibility, no great need to deeply scroll (like the good example of Very Boring Inc., no online equivilent of those ubiquitous frustrating phone trees, i.e. endless menus, non of which quite fit your requirement. The layout was pleasing, not too dazzling. The site didin't resemble an arabian bazaar with content. There was a title for the page, an appropriate search phrase brought it to you as an option within the first or second page of search results. Seeing the suitability - you voluntarily bookmarked the page. No invitation was made by the site for you to set your home page. The site loaded within two or three seconds. If a purchase was made, it was easy and gave a sense of confidence. Any subsequent question was answered quickly and accurately. Any dispute was settled without argument and without the company accusing you of some moral delinquency. The was no profanity. Emails were returned, not simply ignored. You were not left with a feeling that all the company ever wanted was your money, and as quick as possible - even though that is the whole purpose of the sites existence. If you changed your mind, there was a fair returns policy is place.
Will you make a return visit to the site? Of course. Why does the site 'work' whilst others fail to provide the same level of confidence? The same reason that many of these same sites are fixtures in the mall - they've analyzed their customers, paid marketers to plan the site carefully, had an IT testing team, quality control and so on. As they are in the mall, they are in cyberspace - customer centric. What potential customers want they have provided. They haven't taken the short term view but have centered their approach with the intent of staying around for a long time - their cyberspace counterpart of the mall was probably not even profitable for some years. One company with no immediate counterpart in the mall is Amazon, a company that has become the first thought when it comes to thinking about a book purchase. As of August 2004, Amazon have only just become profitable, after many years of losses. (Bezos himself used to joke that the domain should be renamed Amazon.org, because clearly they were a non-profit organization). The company survived the post 2000 crash and has it's place in prime real estate and is a case study for internet commerce.
It may not be a huge company of course - small companies, even individuals, whose sites give a feeling of confidence have a greater chance of making profit through the competitive web. Certainly it can be concluded that one factor which precludes profit is simply - poor quality websites fitting the category of the descriptions given above.

The Product
Products or services don't have to be ground breaking or clearly advantageous. This obviously helps - but selling carpets, greeting cards, oil filters, etc. just meets a need. If it can be done in the mall, it can be done accross the web. The obstacles are recognition, getting heard above the noise, even getting a site well retrieved by the search engines. But first of all, what is the product or service. Does it meet a need? Is the quality good? Would you buy it? How much is the profit of the site dependent on repeat sales? Is the sector particularly crowded? Is the profit margin worth the struggle to get heard? How much is volume important? If a product, is it something that can easily be shipped (and possibly returned) accross large distances? Fundamentally, to sell accross the web - if the product or service is good, if the site is good, if it can be easily received by a buyer - the chances are good that profit can be made even in the most competitive arena. However, another important ingredient is needed. For five thousand sites selling staunton chess sets, which ones will be retrieved by a search engine for a users phrase - 'chess sets'. The answer lies in the domain of a growth industry - search engine optimization (SEO) - dealt with in the next section.

Search Engine Optimization
With two billion pages (September 2004) pages on the internet, the mall has not only become large, but diverse. How can newcomers be heard? How does your site become the one chosen in a users search? Search engine optimizers give thought to the phrases a user might type in to a search engine, and alter the site to be retrieve for those phrases. There is no quick fix for this. An SEO has to look though all a sites content to determine where changes need to be made in the text (or 'copy' in SEO speak). Then the SEO changes page header tags to be equally attractive to search engines. After that it depends on which search engines are mostly used by potential visitors. For Yahoo, the SEO attempts to make the initial description text shown by Yahoo search attractive enough for a person to click through to. This hightens the prominence given to the site by Yahoo. But Google uses different algorithms. The SEO here will attempt to get as many other sites as possible to link to your site. The number of links, the subject of the page linking, and the prominence of the page linking are all factors in what Google calls a PageRank. A good score is 5 or higher. PageRank 7 is tough to get, PR8 extremely difficult and there are only a few hundred PR9 sites in the world, with only a handful of PR10 sites, e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. The higher the pagerank, and as long as the site is 'on theme' (more SEO speak), the site will be retrieved highly in searches bringing potential customers to the door. Google and Yahoo account for over 80% of all web searches.

Summary
Even in a competitive arena, profit can be had if the site is well suited to users. The site needs to have integrity. What potential customers like, and don't like should be studied carefully. Analyze good and bad sites. Avoid unethical practices. Be in for the long term. Make sure the site has good content, has appropriate links and no broken links. Enable the customer to leave with a good feeling.
Ensure the product is well placed, suitable for web marketing and meets some kind of need (or want). In all honesty - would you buy the good or service that you are offering?
Few sites can survive, or even get going without search engine optimization. Learn the skill or get someone else to do it. Finding the way around the web is mostly done by search engines, and being attractive to search engines has become part of the necessary marketing of any website.