Though many begin buys on the Internet, it is still relatively few who complete their transactions there
By Ryan Skinner (email)
This is the fourth part of the ten-part FoIS series that I introduced last week, 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 third question of the survey was:
How many of your business purchases are completed over the Internet?
The responses:
Analysis:
Thanks to e-commerce transaction portals like ShipServ's TradeNet, more and more companies in the shipping business complete business transactions entirely online. An eMarketer survey reported USD 131 billion worth of online sales in the United States in 2009, and a projected USD 183 billion by 2012, to demonstrate the rate of growth.
Testimony from companies completing transactions via online commerce portals give as their reasons: reduced time, reduced administrative costs and fewer errors related to documentation, among others.
As buyers' and sellers' experience working with secure certificates increases, there is reason to believe that the volume of transactions completed over the Internet will increase.
Key points
- Roughly 50 percent of respondents still only complete transactions over the Internet rarely.
- Of those who complete transactions over the Internet, there is an even distribution of those who do it very often and those who do it only occasionally.
Do you have comments to the question, the results or the analysis? Share them below in the comments field!
Tomorrow what I call FoIS (the Future of the Internet in Shipping) continues with part five, in which we see how respondents answered the question: "What's slowing the shipping industry from doing more business over the Internet?"
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