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Here in Australia online shopping has been in the headlines for the last few days for all the wrong reasons and there are some very valuable lessons to be learned from what happened here.So stick with me while I tell the sad tale and then draw some conclusions for adult webmasters.

Both big and small business here in Australia have been rather slow in embracing the idea of selling their products online. Of course there have been some businesses that have taken to the Net to sell their products but we've never had anything comparable to Amazon or any of the other big online retailers that you see in America.

And, because we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, we've never had anything even vaguely similar to Cyber Monday. Anyone who has been selling online here in Australia just sees a gradual increase in sales as we get closer to Christmas.

So along comes a company led by someone who is well-known in retail circles ... a company that offers to build what amounts to a portal that will be open for just one day that will build up a butt-load of hype so that the big retailers who have basically crappy online stores can cash in on what will be Australia's version of Cyber Monday.

Of course to be part of this one-day deal retailers will have to pay lots and lots of money ... there's a registration fee and a fee for banner advertising and a fee for something else and for every special a retailer wanted to list on the portal they had to pay $750. And all those fees added up to a heap of money that each retailer paid to be on the site ... for just one day.

But that wasn't the only angle that the people running the portal were working ... they strongly advised people who wanted to make a purchase on that special day to register and they ended up with around half a million email addresses. Most of those who registered didn't bother with the fine print but if they had they would have found that by supplying their email address they were agreeing to receive emails for the next five years from the people who ran the portal.

And then the big day arrived and at the set time the shopping frenzy ... failed miserably. Within a couple of seconds the portal crashed. Despite the fact that a spokesperson for the company running the portal had said quite plainly earlier that they had the server resources to meet any demand ... they didn't.

However, they weren't the only ones who didn't have the server resources to meet the demand. When people couldn't get onto the portal site many of them went direct to the retailers' websites and many of those sites collapsed under the strain of traffic that just about any big porn host could handle without raising a sweat.

Unfortunately for all those big retailers, potential buyers who did manage to get onto their websites discovered that those much-touted specials weren't really specials at all. The prices being asked for many of the products were as much as 50 per cent higher than what people could buy them for from places like Amazon and, even with shipping, that still made them a better deal to buy overseas than to buy here in Australia.

And in amongst all that are some small businesses who spent a huge amount of money to be included on the portal site who got absolutely nothing in return and several of them have already said that their business has been severely damaged and at least one inferred that his business may not survive the shambles.

Some of the major retailers weren't too happy either and they're suggesting that their brand has now been damaged by the mess created by the company that ran the portal site and really had no clue when it came to coping with big traffic numbers.

So what can beginners in this industry learn from all that?

1. You too will encounter people who want to tempt you with dazzling offers that are almost too good to be true. Look at every offer from every angle and make sure that the people who are making the offer really can deliver.

Here we have a whole bunch of high-flying retailers salivating over what they thought was the chance to make bucket loads of cash when any half-baked adult webmaster could have pointed straight to the major flaw in the offer.

2. If you're a small business then don't put the future of your business into something that depends entirely on other people. In this case a lot of businesses did just that and each of them is now paying for the portal's inability to deliver on its promises.

3. If you're going to offer a special price for something then make sure that it really is a good deal for whoever buys it. The moment they find that they could buy the same item from somewhere else at a much better price you've lost them forever and in this business you really do need to start thinking about keeping your surfers coming back to you for more.

If you are still concentrating only on what happens here in adult then maybe you should occasionally look at what's happening over the fence in mainstream because it really does have a lot to teach us.