[carlosjobim]

Each of these businesses get tons of serious and not serious offers to build them a website. The reason they don't have a website or have a crap website is because they don't want to spend or are in other ways impossible to work with. It is possible, but usually if you're related to these people or already an established big actor.

A much better return is expected by building a web site to sell the product or service yourself. Wether it's tobacco, tupperware, books etc.

[wruza]

I know a guy who has done this and this model turned out to work much better, because the competence stays in right hands. He simply walked around muslim/halal-oriented shops in the city and said: I’ll take your hassle with online orders for some margin. That resulted in a relatively successful webstore.

The reason these shops couldn’t do it themselves is not in software expertise. They just couldn’t work properly. Not all people are successful merchants. When I learned how they did accounting, it made me laugh: they simply called the guy and asked for money. They didn’t know how much money there is, most of them simply relied on the guy’s accounting, trusting him absolutely. He took not only web expertise from them, he took everything except producing or importing goods, including pricing. This worked because of his religion, he was very serious about no mistake in accounting, cause they are basically his brothers under god. Both sides were happy about that.