How will the Internet shape the future of Marketing Internationally?.
As the world has become more globalized, International marketing has taken on added significance over the past ten years. There are many reasons why International Marketing has become more prominent and why a greater number of companies have become globally orientated. One of the most significant reasons for this has been the unprecedented growth of the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW). In the past few years there has been a huge growth of on-line commercial activity. This is generally referred to as electronic commerce or e-commerce. E-commerce can be defined as the enablement of a business vision supported by advanced information technology to increase the effectiveness of the business relationships between trading partners.
Businesses use e-commerce to develop competitive advantage by providing more useful information, expanding choice, developing new services, streamlining purchasing processes, and lowering costs. The Internet also imposes price discipline as customers have access to price and product information from many sources.
The different e-commerce markets may be divided into four categories:.
Business Consumer.
Business B-t-B B-t-C.
EDI relations Curry's.
Companies join forces in e-markets Amazon.
.
Consumer C-t-B (reserve auctions) C-t-C (traditional auctions).
Priceline eBay.
LetsBuyIt.
(Marketing Management, Hollensen 2003).
.
Business-to-Business e-commerce.
E-commerce is not a new idea in the B-to-B market. Many industries have been using a variant of e-commerce known as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for years to streamline business processes and reduce the costs of doing business. EDI is used for the exchange of structured data between the computer systems of trading partners e.g. suppliers to manufacturers. .
Traditionally EDI can be expensive to set-up. This has led to the introduction of web-based EDI links which are only a fraction of the cost for the company and provide much more detailed information including photographs, audio and video clips as well as the purchase orders and invoices found on traditional EDI.
