Estrategia Digital: Entorno, Mercados Electrónicos e Intermediarios Online

Environment Constraints and Opportunities

Customers – Which services are they offering via their website that your organisation could support them in?

Competitors – Need to be benchmarked in order to review the online services they are offering – Do they have a competitive advantage?

Intermediaries – Are new or existing intermediaries offering products or services from your competitors while you are not represented?

Suppliers – Are suppliers offering different methods of procurement to competitors that give them a competitive advantage?

Macro-environment

• Society – What is the ethical and moral consensus on holding personal information?
• Country specific, international legal – What are the local and global legal constraints, for example, on holding personal information, or taxation rules on the sale of goods?
• Technology – What new technologies are emerging by which to deliver online services such as interactive digital TV and mobile phone-based access?

Location of Trading in the Marketplace

Electronic marketplace: A virtual marketplace such as the Internet in which no direct contact occurs between buyers and sellers. It is a marketplace in which sellers and buyers exchange goods and services for money (or for other goods and services), but do so electronically.

Marketplace channel: Structures describe the way a manufacturer or selling organization delivers products and services to its customers.

It is a channel between customers and organization.

A distribution channel consists of one or more intermediaries such as wholesalers and retailers.

Disintermediation: The removal of intermediaries such as distributors or brokers that formerly linked a company to its customer.

Re-intermediation: The creation of new intermediaries between customers and suppliers providing services such as suppliers' search and product evaluation.

Different Places for Online Representation

• Seller-Controlled sites are those that are the main site of the supplier company and are e-commerce-enabled. They are the vendor sites, such as the home site of an organization selling products, e.g., www.dell.com.
• Seller-Oriented sites are intermediaries controlled by third parties to the seller, such as distributors who represent the seller rather than providing a full range of options.
• Neutral sites are independent evaluator intermediaries that are not controlled by the buyer's industry, which can enable price and product comparison and will result in the purchase being fulfilled. E.g., auction space: www.ebay.com.
• Buyer-Oriented sites are intermediaries controlled by third parties on behalf of the buyer.
• Buyer-Controlled sites usually involve either procurement posting on buyer-company sites or those of intermediaries that have been set up in such a way that it is the buyer who initiates the marketplace.

The most successful intermediaries are those who are not independent, but are seller-oriented or seller-controlled.

Three Aspects to Achieve Competitive Advantage Online and When Selecting Intermediaries

1. Reach means how many customers a business can connect with and how many products it can offer to those customers.
2. Richness: This is the depth or detail of information which is both collected about the customers and then about the products (richness of information).
3. Affiliation: This refers to a commission-based arrangement as to whose interests the selling organization represents, consumers or suppliers, and stresses the importance of forming the right partnerships.

Different Types of Online Intermediary

1. Infomediary: A business whose main resource of revenue derives from capturing consumer information and developing detailed profiles of individual customers for use by third parties. Example: E-mail list brokers who obtain permission to e-mail consumers or businesses.
2. Metamediaries: Intermediaries providing information to assist with selection and discussion about different products and services.

Key Concepts in Online Search and Navigation

• Portal: A website that acts as a gateway to information and services available on the internet by providing search engines, directories, and other services such as free e-mail.
• Search engines: A key type of intermediary for organization marketing. It is known as spiders or robots index.
• Directory: It specializes in linking to other websites and categorizing those links. It is not a search engine and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords; instead, it lists websites by category and subcategory.