Building a successful E-commerce business requires more than online selling and content delivery. Gr8ride.com plans to leverage several technologies--personalization, data mining, Web-visitor tracking, and a tagging scheme to organize content--so it can serve several groups of customers.

Owned by publisher Primedia Inc., Gr8ride.com will also leverage its parent company's experience in the automotive industry. Primedia publishes 31 automotive titles. "Our basic business proposition is that we make markets," says Dan McCarthy, president and CEO of Primedia's Enthusiast Group. "Magazines have been the most profitable way to act as market intermediaries. But the Internet is opening up new opportunities, and the core assets we have--content, customers, brand, promoting market relationships--will significantly reduce the cost to enter."

Gr8ride.com will collect data about visitors and will resell that data to suppliers, retailers, and automakers. The plan is to provide anonymous market-trend data free of charge by November and later sell more-focused data that can be used by research and development groups at manufacturers. "We'll track people through the site, and they can also voluntarily tell us about themselves," says Todd Dubner, VP of product development for Primedia's Enthusiast Group. "The market information will help anticipate inventory needs."