The internet has existed for over a decade and the number of online retailers has proliferated. Consumers are drawn to these shopping sites for some quite obvious reasons: the convenience of shopping from home; people lead busy lives and have less time to visit their local high streets; online retailers have smaller overheads and can therefore offer their customers cheaper goods; the range of products online cannot be matched by the high street and the modern consumer is increasingly after something unique or rare.
With this rationale in mind, you might expect that people would substitute the homogenous and uninspiring shopping streets of Britain's cities for the ease and the overwhelming opportunity of the internet. Many do, but judging by my recent trip to a frenzied Oxford Street: many don't. From this limited evidence, there is one rather simple explanation: shopping online appeals to people because of its practicality; but people still enjoy the experience of going out to the shops and interacting with one another (especially women).
In a business-to-business environment, the priorities of the customer are quite different. The 'experience' part of the transaction is arguably insignificant to him or her. The customer often wants to find the right products quickly; they want control their costs and they want to keep an accurate record of what they have bought. Using these measures, ordering online makes perfect sense. Many of my employer's customers have opted for online ordering for these very reasons. Currently, 52.5% of all orders at RED BOX are made online. The figure was only 39.6%, the same time last year. There are some good explanations for why the figure has increased by over 10% since 2006.
Online ordering enables financial controllers to exercise a degree of spending-control over the people who place the orders. Customers can restrict access so that their ordering teams can only order a limited set of products (the products that they usually buy), they can impose authorisation procedures on products that do not belong to their contract list and set spending limits. Prices (cost plus margin) can be tailored so that the customer will always pay the same margin on every product they buy. Every single product purchase is recorded and the customer can create a variety of reports to analyse their spending patterns. These measures provide a level of transparency and real-time spend-control unavailable when ordering by phone or fax or from suppliers who have more underhand pricing policies.
Potentially, online ordering can remove the need to print large volumes of catalogues that rapidly go out of date and provides an easier way to locate products. My employer RED BOX supplies studio and presentation products to a huge number of London's creative companies. The Creation Station microsite was launched recently to replace the arts and graphics catalogue. The site can be accessed from the home page of the RED BOX website and features top of the range presentation products, studio supplies, pads, books, folios, cases and lots more, including helpful hints, tips and colour charts.
The microsite is more favourable over a standard catalogue because changes can be made to it continuously when prices alter and products become discontinued and/or new ones are introduced. It has greater functionality; products are not only arranged in categories in sequential order, but interlinked so that the customer can move efficiently around the site. Fewer catalogues of course reduces the dependence on paper and therefore helps to reduce the environmental impact and costs in production and delivery.
The automated system of online ordering cannot cope with all situations. Despite the growing number of online orders, human support is still required. At RED BOX a team of two maintain the system and provide help and assistance to customers who use online ordering. Compared to orders by phone and fax, the system is able to handle a greater number of orders per employee. However, ordering over the telephone enables the customer to receive an instant response to a product or price enquiry that an online ordering system cannot deliver - yet. For the foreseeable future, RED BOX will continue to allow its customers to order by the method that best suits their needs.
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