Reach. Evans and Wurster say: ‘It [Reach] means, simply, how many customers a busi-
ness can connect with and how many products it can offer to those customers’. Reach
can be increased by moving from a single site to representation with a large number of
different intermediaries. Allen and Fjermestad (2001) suggest that niche suppliers can
readily reach a much wider market due to search-engine marketing (Chapter 8). Evans
and Wurster also suggest that reach refers to the range of products and services that can
be offered since this will increase the number of people the company can appeal to.
Richness. This is the depth or detail of information which is both collected about the
customer and provided to the customer. The latter is related to the richness of product
information and how well it can be personalised to be relevant to the individual needs.
Affiliation. This refers to whose interest the selling organisation represents – consumers
or suppliers – and stresses the importance of forming the right partnerships. This par-
ticularly applies to retailers. The authors suggest that successful online retailers will
provide customers who provide them with the richest information on comparing com-
petitive products. They suggest this tilts the balance in favour of the customer.Localisation
Providing a local site, with or without a language-specific version, is referred to as locali-
sation. A site may need to support customers from a range of countries with:
different product needs;
language differences;
cultural differences.Localisation will address all these issues. It may be that products will be similar in dif-
ferent countries and localisation will simply involve converting the web site to suit
another country. However, in order to be effective, this often needs more than transla-
tion, since different promotion concepts may be needed for different countries.
Examples of localised sites include Durex, B2C, and Gestetner, B2B. Note that each com-
pany prioritises different countries according to the size of the market, and this priority
then governs the amount of work it puts into localisation.PLACETable 5.2 Different places for cyberspace representationPlace of purchase Examples of sites
A Seller-controlled Vendor sites, i.e. home site of organisation selling products,
e.g. http://www.dell.com
B Seller-oriented Intermediaries controlled by third parties to the seller such
as distributors and agents, e.g. Opodo (www.opodo.com)
represents the main air carriers
C Neutral Intermediaries not controlled by buyer’s industry, e.g. EC21
(www.ec21.com)
Product-specific search engines, e.g. CNET
(www.computer.com)
Comparison sites, e.g. uSwitch (www.uswitch.com)
Auction space, e.g. eBay (www.eBay.com)
D Buyer-oriented Intermediaries controlled by buyers, e.g. the remaining parts
of the Covisint network of motor manufacturers
Purchasing agents and aggregators
E Buyer-controlled Web site procurement posting on company’s own site, e.g.
GE Trading Process Network (www.tpn.geis.com)Localisation
Tailoring of web site
information for
individual countries or
regions.