Representives from five different companies and several World Wide Web experts talk about doing business on the Web.
From bakeries to ski resorts, businesses are setting up shop on the Web. Should you?
Like the wine it produced, the winery was young. Its first vintage had gone into the bottle in 1992. With just $400,000 in annual sales and not enough money to market its wines through national distributors or gourmet magazines, Clos LaChance Wines, in Saratoga, Calif., needed an innovative marketing scheme.
Then an old friend called and offered to help Bill Murphy, the owner and founder of Clos LaChance, create a presence on the Internet, the worldwide network of almost 4 million computers, used by an estimated 15 million to 30 million people. Better still, the friend offered to help the wine company set up shop on the most innovative part of the Internet, the World Wide Web. Murphy jumped at the chance, and Clos LaChance became one of more than 1,800 companies to establish a presence on the Web.
For years computer gurus have been predicting that most customer-oriented aspects of a business -- from advertising to marketing to sales -- would be handled over computer networks. While it's not hard to picture companies in high-technology industries managing customer transactions electronically, it's more difficult to imagine businesses in other industries doing so.
The Web is changing all that. Easy to use, it has lots of color and graphics, and the kind of intuitive structure lacking in all but the most recent computer software. By virtue of its remarkable growth rate -- by the end of 1994, Web sources estimate, it had more than 2 million regular users -- the Web is rapidly turning into a true commercial network. From oil companies to real estate brokerages, from bakeries to ski resorts, businesses are setting up shop on the Web. It may make sense for you to do the same.
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Once you get the right software and a special phone account with an Internet service provider, the Web is much easier to use than a conventional computer network, including most of the Internet. Instead of having to cope with a clumsy interface, Web users simply type the address of the site they want to visit.
Type Clos LaChance's Web address into your Web browser software and a blue-and-white image of the company's label appears. Called a home page, this is the Clos LaChance storefront on the Web. But what you see is just the first of several layers of information. Beneath the image lies the company's postal address, followed by a one-paragraph description of the types of wine the company produces and what makes its wine special. Between the address and the description is a highlighted line mentioning the company's "holiday giftpak." The highlighting means that the line is linked to another page of information. Clicking there once with your mouse brings up an order form.
Just because the Web has some 2 million users, of course, doesn't mean that 2 million people will suddenly begin to buy Murphy's wine. The challenge for any small-business owner on the Web is to turn browsers into customers. What distinguishes a Web page from a yellow-pages ad is the additional information that the Web page provides. Buttons on Clos LaChance's home page, for instance, connect to pages called News, Products and Services, Company Overview, and Contact and Support. Murphy hopes those infomercial pages will persuade browsers to buy his wines when they read, for example, that his 1992 chardonnay sold out after receiving a favorable review in the Wine Spectator. A Web page can create an aura around the product itself much more vividly than the average label.
Another appealing feature of the Web is hypertext linking, which allows you to move to related topics both within and between sites. When you click on a designated button, you zip to another page within the site or even to the home page of a different site. That capability gives the Web an ease of use that brochures and conventional computer networks can't match.
Like many other small-business owners, Murphy is finding that it costs little to establish a presence on the Web. He pays $50 a month to an Internet provider to rent space. His Web storefront is drawn from a marketing brochure that a friend made computer-ready at no charge. "If the page starts to bring in new customers, I'll pay him a percentage of sales," notes Murphy.
Best of all, the Web levels the playing field, says Murphy. "We're a little bitty guy. We cannot compete from an advertising standpoint with [much bigger wineries like Robert] Mondavi." But on the Web, he says, "our information will be as accessible as theirs."
Aspen Skiing Co. represents another type of business you might not expect to find on the World Wide Web. The company runs four ski facilities in Aspen, Colo. With more than $50 million in revenues in 1994, it is large enough to put a lot of money into advertising and marketing, but it has laid out virtually no money to set up its own Web page. Its purpose in establishing a Web presence is twofold: customer service and marketing.
Aspen Skiing's aim is to use technology to distinguish itself from other ski facilities. Aspen SmallWorks, a research-and-development lab connected with Sun Microsystems, in Mountain View, Calif., has set up kiosks with touch-sensitive screens at Aspen Skiing's four locations to show visitors the view from the top of local mountains and to give them up-to-the-minute weather reports.
The ski company is trying to do something similar for its customers -- before they ever leave home. With the help of Aspen SmallWorks, it has set up a Web page, based on its brochure, that informs potential customers about its prices and the specifics of its rooms and tour packages. It plans to include weather reports updated daily or even hourly. And ultimately, it intends to use the graphical power of the Web to show each customer the actual room he or she is reserving -- and the view from that room.
Aspen Skiing set up an Internet presence -- an E-mail address in its literature and a Web page -- as an experiment, says marketing vice-president Kitty Boone. The early results have been encouraging. "My sense is that it's already paying off," says Boone. "If that's how our customers want information, it's our job to provide it that way." She notes that the trend now is away from mass marketing and toward very tailored direct-marketing communications, which answers questions a radio ad or a general brochure can't address. "The Internet will take direct marketing a step further," she says.
