A survey co-produced by 59° 56' N and ShipServ on Internet use in shipping businesses, over 10 days
By Ryan Skinner (email)
This spring, I developed a survey, with the co-operation and support of ShipServ and for their Connect10 e-commerce summit in Copenhagen, about the use of the Internet and e-commerce across the shipping industry. Now the results will be published for the first time, on this blog, over the next ten days.
Come back each day to follow the responses, make comments to the results and join the discussion. Or send me an email, and you will get the full survey as a .pdf report in an email attachment the day after the final question and answer is published.
We set out to determine how, when and why shipping professionals use the 'net in their work and purchases.
The simple eight questions we devised:
- How much time do you spend on the Internet daily doing business-related tasks?
- How many of your business purchases today start with the Internet?
- How many of your business purchases today are completed over the Internet?
- What's slowing the industry from doing more business over the Internet?
- What do you see as the greatest value of doing business over the Internet?
- What do you look for when making a business decision based on information found on a website?
- If you were to compare adoption of Internet-based tools in your business as a voyage from Shanghai to Rotterdam, where would your company be right now?
- What's your view of social media and its role in the shipping business?
Over the month-long duration of the survey, 175 shipping professionals responded to the survey questions. Since the means of gathering responses were primarily through social networking and ShipServ-related channels, the responses are skewed towards those individuals and companies already active in Internet-driven business; they are a kind of vanguard. For that reason, this survey can be considered a picture of Internet use and attitudes in the shipping business in the near future.
Starting tomorrow, I will go through each question day-by-day for eight days, and wrap up with a conclusion. I will present the question, the cumulative responses, an analysis of these responses and key points in each post. People should feel free to comment on the question, interpret the responses or judge the analysis and key points in the comments of each post. This meta-data will become part of the survey.
Tomorrow the series continues with part two, in which we see how respondents answered the question: "How much time do you spend on the Internet daily doing business-related tasks?"
Follow closely.
Very interesting! I look forward to this series. Thanks for organizing it Ryan.
Posted by: Peter A. Mello | October 07, 2010 at 05:49 PM