E-business E-Business - everyone has heard of it, politicians love it, but not many people are very sure what it really means. We can help you to understand it, and more importantly, we can provide the expertise which will give you the edge over your competitors. This Is Not Online Retailing There are two distinct types of e-business - those which sell goods to the public by accepting credit card orders from their websites, and those which don't. This page is about those which don't - for more information about online credit-card retailing, please see our WEB hosting page. |
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More Than Just A Website Because this is the Web Design section of our site, this page concentrates on the e-business strategies you can develop through your own internet website. But e-business can offer many more benefits in all kinds of areas - for a few suggestions, see our Consultancy section. Reducing Communication and Promotion Costs If your customers have an internet connection, you can use your website to communicate with them in just the same way as you would communicate with them by post or by fax - but at much lower cost. Sending printed documents by post is very costly - once the design is finished, you have the expense of repro and printing, and the cost of mailing and perhaps using reply-paid envelopes. But using your website to display the information, and email messages to contact your customers, allows you to save almost all these costs. Once the design is finished, you just upload it to your website, write an email containing information about it, send the email to your whole customer list with a few mouse-clicks, and that's it - job done, and paid for. Online Ordering Systems You can also provide online catalogues and order forms on your website, which your customers can operate using their web browser. These can be open to public view, or you can set up a password-protected area in your site so that you can control who sees the pages. As more companies get connected to the net,
they will increasingly use online systems in preference to the more
expensive telephone and fax options - and if you can't provide online
ordering facilities, they may look for another supplier who can. |