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

Selling on the Internet 289
www.dash.com
Dash is about cash. The approach of this shopping bot is to give you
cash back, up to 25%, every time you shop online, along with special
coupons and savings opportunities. Dash uses a dashBar, which sits at
the bottom of your Web browser and combines the typical comparison
shopping with coupon alerts, local weather and news, Web search, and
other handy features.
www.respond.com
Respond.com is not so much a shopping bot as a new breed of shopping
service. By January 2000, Respond.com had 45,000 participating merchants,
which pay varying fees for leads. The novel twist here is that a
prospective buyer tells Respond.com what he or she is looking for and
at what price. Respond.com acts as the middleman, e-mailing the appropriate
merchants with the request. The prospective buyer then receives
offers from those merchants who want the business, kind of like
a reverse auction. Respond.com already has relationships with America
Online and Excite.
How to Get an E-commerce Order
Generation System Up and Running
The bottom line for b-to-b marketers who want to sell over the Internet
is that, one way or the other, they will need to have an e-commerce
order generation system available to them. Many b-to-b companies may
choose to outsource the entire system or use someone else’s system (such
as a virtual mall, an exchange, or a service that creates an online store),
but others may wish to make a long-term commitment to e-commerce
by establishing their own system. To address this need, look at it from
two different perspectives—modifying your existing order generation
system versus creating a new order generation system.
Transitioning from an Existing Order Generation System
Transitioning to the Internet from an existing order generation system
is no less challenging than building a system from scratch. You should