Half of shipping's purchasers start most of their buying processes on the Internet
By Ryan Skinner (email)
This is the third part of the ten-part FoIS series that I introduced yesterday, presenting the results of a unique survey about Internet use in the shipping industry. The survey was created by this blog, together with ShipServ for its Connect10 conference earlier this year.
For those interested in receiving the full responses in a .pdf report after the full series has been published, send me an email requesting it.
The second question of the survey was:
How many of your business purchases today start with the Internet?
The responses:
Analysis:
The buying process in B2B transactions generally begins by determining the need, creating a specification, identifying potential suppliers and comparing their offerings. Google has quite simply become one of the most common ways to identify suppliers of given products, as people's use of the Internet at home has impacted how they use the Internet at work.
A 2007 survey from Enquiro found online influencers such as vendor web-sites and search engines outperformed offline influencers like trade shows and paid consultants. Another study found the overwhelming majority of technical buyers begin a research process with a broad Internet search by product category.
On the opposite end of the purchaser is the supplier. Because so many purchases start with Internet research, Forrester, among others, has found that findability (the ability for buyers to find sellers' sites and the product and information they seek within that site) can be a question of millions of dollars in lost profit for businesses.
Key points
- Roughly 50 per cent of shipping purchasers begin the majority of their buying processes on the Inernet
- One in seven shipping buyers begin more or less every purchase online.
Tomorrow what I call FoIS (the Future of the Internet in Shipping) continues with part four, in which we see how respondents answered the question: "What percentage of your business purchases today are completed over the Internet?"
Karen Segalla • We are an air booking/ticketing marine agency supplying air reservations to the Cruise Line and Cargo industry. The Internet has dramatically increased our business and has cut costs which we have been able to pass on to our clients. It is no longer necessary to have multi-offices globally, as the Internet allows us to create a 'virtual' office by providing our clients with IPhones, as an extension to our office. It has substantially cut communication costs worldwide and our clients are able to contact us from anywhere in the world, and vice versa, on a 24 / 7 / 365
level.
Posted by: Karen Segalla | September 27, 2010 at 07:09 PM
We sell an ERP-system that is built on top of the latest internet technology, which makes it very adaptive and suited for liner companies and companies that use agencies. You typically don't want to have agencies having to learn a complete ERP suite. You want to have people learn certain primary processes that easily can be accessed via a web interface... have a look at http://www.ultimateshippingsolutions.com
Posted by: Rene Altena | September 27, 2010 at 08:19 PM