Analysis: Ignorance is bliss on Web

IT managers are being pushed aside when it comes to electronic commerce, was the resounding message from last week?s Business Online Conference in Amsterdam.

The Giga Information Group?s IT event was remarkable for the high proportion of delegates who had no IT background. Electronic commerce, it seems, is being driven by marketing and sales as much as IT.

Cor Molenaar, managing director of the direct marketing arm of advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather, likened electronic commerce ? especially on the Internet ? to the sex education classes at his Catholic boys? school in Holland. ?They were taken by a priest who had absolutely no experience of what he was talking about,? said Molenaar. ?You look at ecommerce and you see IT people telling marketing people how to market, and marketing people telling IT how to do IT. It makes no sense.?

As a result, he said, ?when I go on the Internet I see a lot of arrogant people talking about themselves?.

Molenaar cited the Web sites of three of the main banks in Holland as examples. He said they were poorly constructed sales pitches that performed little better than a brochure would. There was hardly any interaction with customers and the sites did not target the groups that were most likely to use the Web. They appeared to exist only because somebody thought the bank should be on the Web.

If some of the audience laughed uncomfortably at Molenaar?s analysis, this was perhaps because they recognised the weaknesses of their own sites. Selected golden rules of good practice pushed Molenaar?s message home.

Whether a site is for direct sales, information and advertising, procurement or low-cost electronic data interchange (EDI), Molenaar said, it must target the market effectively, be interactive and ensure that backup services do not disappoint.

The Giga conference highlighted the fact that, in spite of general under achievement, there are enough worthwhile examples of ecommerce to encourage users to persevere.

Martin Carfrae, commercial systems manager of courier DHL, described the success of the company?s Web site. The aim, he said, was to make ?doing business with DHL easier? and the approach was pragmatic.

The company had identified ?customer facing processes? and found they formed a cycle of eight separate actions, of which five could be performed electronically. DHL could allow customers to define the cost of a delivery, book it, complete the paperwork, trace the delivery and pay for it, all through the Web.

Now, 40% of DHL?s shipment data is entered electronically by customers. The parcel tracing element has been particularly successful. Because customers can enter trace requests simply by entering the shipment number, ?95% of all trace requests are now done electronically?, Carfrae said.

Vauxhall Motors claimed another Web success. Set up and run by IBM, the site gives customers the opportunity to browse through an online Vauxhall catalogue.

The carrot to tempt them onto the site in the first place is a graphical traffic information service. According to Vauxhall, customers can obtain more detailed information on traffic problems and delays here than from a radio traffic round-up or from Ceefax.

Another successful example was provided by Wijnand Jongen, co-creator of Macropolis, Holland?s answer to the UK?s Barclay Square online shopping mall. The site is still being rolled out and the full 3-D ?virtual shopping experience? is to be delivered later this year. It uses the familiar motif of a ?city? through which shoppers can walk (they can even take a taxi if they are feeling lazy) or can access through menus.

This is the Internet site manager as property developer: Macropolis rents out space to clients and uses the big names (Dixons, for example) to lure customers, hoping they will then browse through the mall and find smaller shops with which they may not be familiar.

The system helps these small businesses overcome the problems of visibility on the Internet. As Hugo Lunardelli, Microsoft?s European Internet commerce manager, pointed out: ?You can set up a shop in the desert cheaply, but you won?t get many customers.

?The amount you spend on setting up a Web site is irrelevant compared with the money you need to make your site visible.?

All the presentations at the conference had one thing in common: there was little talk of technology but plenty about serving the customer, targeting markets and effective post-sales backup.

If they are not to be left behind, IT managers are going to have to work hard to catch up with these marketing concepts.

One thing the conference made clear is that ecommerce is not about having a Web site strategy, it is about marketing, selling and running a business more efficiently.

? Report by Colin Barker.