An increasing number of large companies are using the Internet for comparative shopping and to find new suppliers. Here are some of the best places to list your site so buyers can find it.
Internet Commerce
The Internet eliminates geography, but for companies seeking new customers on-line, the secret is still location, location, location
When Nancy Croke goes shopping, she's as likely to use a mouse as a telephone.
If Croke were buying CDs or some flowers, her Internet leanings would matter--a little--to the Web retailers vying for her $25. But Croke, purchasing manager for Comdisco Inc., a $4-billion technology-services company in Rosemont, Ill., spends several million dollars each year on office equipment, general supplies, and other materials. That makes her sourcing habits terribly interesting to companies that do big business--even if it's in small drabs--with corporate customers.
Suppliers that dismiss Croke's electronic sourcing as anomalous--hey, Comdisco is a technology company, right?--might find Joe Yacura's example more persuasive. Yacura is senior vice-president for global procurement at American Express Co. in New York City. His office conducts 25 to 50 Internet searches for new suppliers a month, and he reckons that in the next year and a half the financial-services giant will be placing 10% to 20% of its purchase orders over the Web. "The Internet allows us to compile a list of potentially eligible companies within a few minutes," Yacura says. Compare that with the days or weeks his staff normally spends poring over trade publications and print catalogs.
Corporate-procurement organizations are discovering the Internet in a big way, using it to do comparative shopping, find local suppliers, and locate unusual products and services. As of November 1997, 93% of purchasing managers had Internet access and another 5% planned to get it soon, according to a survey by the National Association of Purchasing Management, in Tempe, Ariz. And those browsers aren't just idling on desktops: 34% of respondents reported using the Web for their jobs 5 to 10 times a week, and 19% said they accessed it more than 20 times a week.
Some of those folks are using the Net for the kind of rich, thick transactional activities--such as electronic data interchange and purchasing from customized catalogs--that characterize commerce between established business partners. But many more consider it a research tool, a convenient information source when they're considering switching suppliers or procuring a product for the first time.
It's also a great way to compare prices: Croke, for example, who expects to do about 50% of her purchasing over the Internet by the year 2000, says she finds "the best discounts" on the Web.
For every Nancy Croke or Joe Yacura out there seeking a new vendor, there are hundreds of suppliers with their hands in the air hoping to be called on. Their challenge isn't so much getting on the Web as it is placing themselves in the line of sight of hungry buyers. In yet another cyberspace-spawned irony, success in the medium that eliminates geography is increasingly coming down to location, location, location.
So how do companies with nonintuitive domain names find new corporate customers on the Web? Listing yourself with the search engines is necessary but not sufficient. Sites such as HotBot, Excite, and Lycos allow users to enter keywords and retrieve a list of sites where those words appear, but the results are so broad that any one company has as much chance of being found as a needle in a pile of needles. A search for "oil filters" on Infoseek, for example, turned up 5,804 sites.
Then there are the Internet yellow pages such as BigBook and BigYellow. Those function much like their print counterparts: users enter a product category and a city or state and get back a list of more-or-less relevant companies. But those sites, too, tend to degenerate into crowd scenes. "Most business-to-business marketers won't get a whole lot of new business this way," says Alex Hiam, a marketing consultant based in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Marketing for Dummies (IDG Books, 1997). "I'm listed in Internet yellow pages and several other directories, and about once a year I get a serious inquiry from them."
A better strategy for being found is to follow the rule that governs real-world commerce: Go where your potential customers are.
Of course, you can't peek at buyers' bookmarks to see which sites they frequent, but you can consult industry associations and check out Web sites that advertise in trade journals. The most valuable insights may come from your existing customers, who can tell you how they use the Internet and where they find sourcing information. "If I am a small company selling business to business on the Internet, I need to seriously target," says Jim Sterne, president of Target Marketing, an Internet-marketing consulting firm in Santa Barbara, Calif. "My customers can tell me how to do that."
One thing customers are likely to tell you is that they're consulting on-line versions of the same references they've trusted for years. The 100-year-old Thomas Register of American Manufacturers, for example, would be considered the Bible of many procurement managers--if the Bible ran to 23 volumes. Now Thomas Register is available on the Web in all its 155,000-vendor glory. If you're a manufacturer and you haven't already listed yourself with Thomas Register, then the Web site--where users can do refined searches by product type or brand name in more than 60,000 categories--offers additional incentive to do so.
As of April, the Thomas Register site had 780,500 registered users performing nearly 70,000 searches daily and generating 1,000 E-mail requests for information, according to Julianne Garry, Thomas Publishing's director of Internet marketing. A basic listing--company name, address, and a brief description of services--is free to any U.S. or Canadian manufacturer. If you want to show more than just the tip of your iceberg, you can pay for advertising, which takes a variety of forms in the print, CD -ROM, and on-line versions. For example, $3,000 will buy links to 15 pages of your stand-alone Web site (if you have one) or an 8-page catalog on the Thomas Register server if you don't. Also included: assistance with site design and an E-mail address.
