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Net Prophet - by Dylan Tweney

September 8, 1997

Internet commerce: Artfully, profitably working the Web


Seems like everyone's trying to make a buck on the Internet these days. But how are they doing it? Just about any way they can. The truth is, there are as many ways to approach Internet commerce as there are ways of doing business in the "real" world.

What does this mean for your business? Plenty. If you had written off the Internet as unsuitable for mission-critical, line-of-business applications, take another look.

Business is booming on the Internet, and the biggest growth area for the next few years is in business-to-business transactions. The Web is a wonderful opportunity to streamline, automate, and standardize many of your business relationships with suppliers, distributors, and partners.

A well-crafted extranet can offer you and the companies with whom you do business many of the benefits of an electronic data interchange (EDI) system, with few of the drawbacks associated with EDI's expensive and proprietary technologies.

And as the stories in our inaugural Focus on I-Commerce section make clear, there is no shortage of tools to help you get your business online.

Taking care of business

I-commerce doesn't have to mean building an order-processing system that's Web-based from end to end. In fact, it might be as simple as putting product spec sheets on an extranet site so your customers can get detailed information at the click of a mouse button. If this online product information is integrated with your existing sales channels, even this relatively modest Web project can help stimulate business.

I-commerce doesn't just mean sales, either. It also means taking care of your customers. And as it happens, that's something that the Web is ideally suited to doing.

One company that has grasped this concept is Pall Corp., a manufacturer of high-end filters for use in a wide variety of industries. Pall's business-to-business commerce site, at http://www.pall.com, provides a huge amount of information on the company's products -- everything from specifications to technical white papers. But the Web site also provides information on the industries themselves and on the importance of filtration in various applications.

I spoke with Claire Zinnes, interactive marketing manager at Pall, who, with the help of marketing agency Hensley Segal Rentschler, created Pall's site in less than 10 weeks last year. Since then, mountains of information have been added to the site -- sometimes as much as 100 pages per week. Pall's goal in building the site, Zinnes told me, was to attract a community of repeat visitors and to give a sense of the breadth to Pall's business.

By providing a broad base of information, plus interactive applications that help customers decide which filter to use, Pall's Web site helps cement relationships with customers. "What we've gotten in return is loyal visitors," Zinnes said.

Surprisingly, the site doesn't even have a full-fledged product catalog or product order forms. But each page does have a form for visitors to send messages to Pall. And these forms have generated a lot of sales leads, which are then closed by the sales force or through Pall's distributors.

"If you start with the product, the customer comes to the site, they see what they need, and then they leave," Zinnes said. But by providing in-depth industry and product information, Pall's Web site is attracting repeat visitors, and it's helping the company's business.

Cashing in

As Zinnes and people like her have shown, there are many ways to cash in on the I-commerce boom.

If you start building an I-commerce infrastructure now -- however modest it may seem -- you can positively contribute to your company's bottom line. If you are an IS manager, this success can help you transform IS from a cost center to a source of profits. And you can put yourself in the driver's seat for future, and more ambitious, I-commerce initiatives.

Stick around. In this monthly print section, and on our continually updated Web site (http://www.infoworld.com), we'll bring you the strategic information, product reviews, and news that you'll need to stay on top of the I-commerce explosion. And we'll help you make sense of it all, so you can bring your company's business online, profitably.


Dylan Tweney is the editor of InfoWorld's Focus on I-Commerce section. He welcomes your comments at dylan@infoworld.com.

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Please direct your comments to InfoWorld Electric.

Copyright © 1999 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

IBM is the proud sponsor of the I-Commerce section on InfoWorld Electric.

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