‘Agility’ refers to the speed at which a company is able to change strategic direction and
respond to new customer demands. ‘Reach’ is the ability to connect to or to promote
products and generate new business in new markets. ‘Time-to-market’ is the product life-
cycle from concept through to revenue generation. Companies with a high competitive
capability within their market and competitive markets are arguably the most important
ones to watch.
Companies can also turn to benchmarking organisations such as Gomez
(www.gomez.com) to review e-commerce scorecards. In some sectors such as banking,
competitors share data with a benchmarking organisation, enabling them to see their
relative performance (without knowing actual sales or efficiency levels). An example is
eBenchmarkers, which in the UK produces reports for different financial services mar-
kets. Performance criteria are related to the conversion efficiency introduced earlier –
companies are ranked relative to each other on their capacity to attract, convert and
retain customers to use their e-commerce services.
To assess the success of competitors in generating visitors to their web sites, a variety of
data sources can be used; the methods of collection are explained further in Chapter 9.
Panel data can be used to compare number and type of visitors to competitor sites
through time.
Summaries of ISP data such as Hitwise (www.hitwise.co.uk) can be used to assess visi-
tor rankings for different competitors.
Audits of web site traffic such as that produced by ABCelectronic (www.abce.org) can
be used for basic comparison of visitors.We revisit competitor benchmarking in more detail in Chapters 4 and 7.The most significant aspect of monitoring suppliers in the context of Internet marketing
is with respect to the effect suppliers have on the value of quality of product or service
delivered to the end customer. Key issues include the effect of suppliers on product price,
availability and features. This topic is not discussed further since it is less significant
than other factors in an Internet marketing context.Marketing intermediariesare firms that can help a company to promote, sell and distrib-
ute its products or services. In the Internet context, online intermediaries can be
contrasted with destination sites which are typically merchant sites owned by manufac-
turers or retailers which offer information and products (in reality any type of site can be
adestination site, but the term is generally used to refer to merchant and brand sites).
Online intermediary sitesprovide information about destination sites and provide a
means of connecting Internet users with product information. The best known online
intermediaries are the most popular sites such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! These are
known as ‘portals’ and are described further below. Other consumer intermediaries such
as Kelkoo (www.kelkoo.com) and Bizrate (www.bizrate.com) provide price comparisonCHAPTER 2· THE INTERNET MICRO-ENVIRONMENT
Suppliers
Intermediaries
Marketing
intermediaries
Firms that can help a
company to promote,
sell and distribute its
products or services.
Destination sites
Sites typically owned by
merchants, product
manufacturers or
retailers, providing
product information.