Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

Executing E-fulfillment 187
In addition to communities whose primary goal is to disseminate
information, there are now b-to-b communities whose primary goal is
to sell products from a single location. These communities are especially
interesting because they are redefining the rules of e-commerce.
Typically, a consortium of companies agrees to place its products for
sale on a single site, providing customers with a single point of contact,
a single invoice, and centralized order processing. Theses companies
extend their presence, their buying power, and their market by collaborating.
Communities have become such a significant trend, in fact, that
an entire chapter is devoted to the topic.
Another Internet growth area that has ramifications for b-to-b marketers
is the information consolidator or reseller, sometimes known as
“infomediaries.” These are companies who leverage information and
either distribute it in new ways, or sell it in the form of packaged services.
About.com (www.about.com) is a good example of a consolidator.
The site collects information and distributes in the form of
communities hosted by human guides. Information syndicators such as
Screaming Media (www.screamingmedia.com) and Yellow Brix
(yellowbrix.com) consolidate Web information, repackage it, and sell it.
Creating Online Demos and Trials
E-fulfillment holds great promise in the context of printed information
that is converted to the electronic medium, but there is an even more
exciting aspect to e-fulfillment—online demos and trials. The Web has
become a major marketing medium for information technology marketers—primarily
software companies—who use it as a giant arena for
delivering online product demonstrations and trials. An online demo of
a software product can be executed in a few different ways. Probably
the least desirable is an actual interactive demo that happens on the
Web in real time. A live demo can be affected by too many factors beyond
the marketer’s control—the Internet connection or Web traffic,
the nature of the user’s transmission device, the target computer’s capabilities,
and so on. Nevertheless, some marketers execute fast-running
live demos in real time over the Web.
An alternative is the online demo that simulates the product’s capabilities
or includes a partially live demonstration. This type of demo is
more of a guided tour or walk-through of the software—it allows some