A: In good old days of Internet, i.e. last year, it took a considerable amount of effort to launch an ecommerce website, especially one that offered dropship merchandise.

The to-do list for building even a small site was extensive.

You first had to find a company who would dropship merchandise for you. Believe it or not, there was not a dropshipper on every corner of Web back then.

Once you found such a company, you had to set up a formal business account with them, which often meant filling out forms, jumping through hoops, providing them with proof of a business license, a tax ID number, a pint of blood, promise of your first born, and on and on.

Then real fun began.

You had to tear apart company's print catalogs and scan in pictures of merchandise you wanted to sell on site.

You had to build website by hand with an HTML editor, and type in all product descriptions and prices, which made updating site a manual nightmare. Changing $1.95 to $2.95 could literally take half an hour.

You had to find a dependable hosting company to host site. This was harder than you might think. Finding a dependable hosting company in golden age of Internet was like finding a painless dentist in old west. They just didn't exist. You had to opt for hosting company that you hoped would cause you least amount of pain. And you were always wrong.

Starting a business is never easy and odds of your success or failure are about even money. The fact is, approximately half of all small businesses fail within first four years. And a large percentage of those failures occur within first year. These are statistics that keep many entrepreneurs awake at night. Like Sisyphus, always pushing that boulder to top of hill only to have it tumble back to bottom each time, you never know when you're going to lose your grip on your business and have it tumble back over you.

OK, so far in this column I have managed to squeeze in references to modern American television and ancient Greek mythology. Enough highbrow beating around bush. Perform autopsy and learn from it. Only by knowing real reasons your business died can you identify and hopefully stave off those maladies before they take you down next time, if there is a next time. And if you're a true entrepreneur there will be a next time, trust me on this.

There are many reasons why businesses fail, but according to a recent survey by U.S. Bank, majority of business failures can be attributed to three reasons: bad management, bad financial planning, and bad marketing.

Bad management comes in many forms. The survey showed that seventy-eight percent of business failures examined were due in part to lack of a well-developed business plan and a business owner who had no business being in business he was in. In other words, business owner did not have an adequate knowledge or a thorough understanding of business he had chosen to start. This is why software entrepreneurs like me don't start shoe stores. I have feet, I wear shoes. That's not enough to qualify me to go into shoe business.

Next, seventy-three percent of business failures in survey were also manned by owners with rose colored calculators. These business owners over-estimated revenue projections (the number of expected sales) and under-estimated burn rate (the amount of money required to sustain business per month).