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

274 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING
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Selling on the Internet
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Selling on the Internet is, of course, the holy grail of Internet marketing.
That is why it is the last, but certainly not the least, of the Internet
marketing strategies discussed in this book. For b-to-b marketers,
e-commerce is the culmination of every online marketing effort, the ultimate
goal of every marketing activity. Although not all products and
services are appropriate for selling on the Internet, almost every b-to-b
Internet marketer can find a way to sell something.
Despite the rapid rate of e-commerce growth, selling online has claimed
its casualties. The Internet landscape has recently been littered with unsuccessful
dot-coms whose online sales failed to meet their lofty expectations.
However, many of these failures have been the result of poor business
plans or overreliance on the Internet as an exclusive sales channel.
Now there is a new attitude toward selling on the Internet, not necessarily
negative, but cautious and calculated. This is likely to be a good
thing, because companies are more closely evaluating the risks as well
as the rewards. Taking a lesson from the pure play dot-com failures, it is
the “click and mortars” who are now finding that the best way to sell
online is to integrate it with selling offline. E-commerce thus becomes
one vitally important sales strategy, but not the only one.
This chapter looks at some of the ways you can take advantage of
e-commerce and helps guide you toward avoiding the pitfalls and turning
a profit online.