A few years ago we developed a site just for internet sales (screenprinting). We spent thousands on adwords and had a lot of clicks. Only a very small percent of clicks turned into jobs, many of the customers were just tire kickers, and a lot of them were total lunitics. We did get a few ligitimate jobs, but we were running a loss of about $1,000 a month on the program. I discontinued it, but to this day we still get one or two new customers a month due to word of mouth from other customers who found us by adwords, and we have established a handful of repeat customers.
During the past few months we have fired several of those repeat customers because they were PITA customers. One of them would ask me two weeks in advance if we could complete his job by X date, of course I would tell him yes, then I wouldn't hear back about the job until the day before he wanted it shipped out - he would tell us "you should have the shirts tomorrow and I need it to ship Fedex by the end of the day, I will send you the artwork in a hour." Then we would get the artwork about 3pm the next day and had just a couple of hours to complete the job. just was not worth the hassle.
But we do have a few great customers that we got from that. One will order a couple of thousand shirts every 6 months or so, he doesn't care what shirt colors so we are able to clean up all the extras that are on our shelves and fill in a lot of the rest of the order with discontinued colors purchased at discounts.
Long term, if you are offering a repeat customer type of product, it may be worth it. Short term, it is a big waste.
