An e-commerce plan is a necessity

By Jack Keough, EDITOR/ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER -- Industrial Distribution, 7/1/2000

Last Christmas I entered the electronic age and ordered gifts online. In early December, I ordered a music box from the San Francisco Music Box Co. and a bracelet from Macy's.

It couldn't have been easier to get the music box. It was simple to order, arrived gift-wrapped and on time. The company had first e-mailed me, reporting that the item was in stock and being processed.

I was even told when it would be delivered. Macy's was a different story. The gift failed to arrive and a week before Christmas I was e-mailing, telephoning and getting little or no response. Finally, someone at Macy's admitted: "We just weren't prepared for the amount of business we got online. We don't even know if the bracelet you ordered is in stock." The bottom line: the gift didn't arrive until mid January. Guess what? I don't ever intend to buy anything else from them.

It was a tale of two e-commerce businesses. One company had the people and technology in place to fill the order. The other didn't have an e-commerce plan.

This is a problem facing all companies trying to do business online. Distribution is no exception. Our 54 ^th Annual Survey of Distributor Operations (p.60) shows that 68 percent of distributors today have Web sites. A majority of distributors (59 percent) also report that they have actually sold products from their site. This isn't true e-commerce, however. Most of these distributors are getting orders via e-mail and then manually processing them.

And this could actually be costing distributors money, according to Steve Epner of BSW Consulting who points out that distributors attempting to sell products online should have an e-commerce strategy. The problem is, according to our survey, most distributors (68 percent) don't have such a strategy in place.

In this month's issue, Web Manager Ken Brack details some options for distributors who are looking to develop an e-commerce strategy (p.54). There are many questions distributors must answer before deciding on such a policy. For example, should you actually sell products from your Web site or should you join a B2B e-commerce portal? Or a combination of both? Read Ken's article and learn more about the many strategies available to you as you enter the world of e-commerce.