Monday, February 11, 2008

Building Stronger Ties with Better Solutions

Microsoft's e-commerce strategy aims to help companies establish stronger ties with customers and business partners by developing solutions using its e-commerce platform, its partners, and the services of its Internet portal, MSN–The Microsoft Network. These solutions generally fall into one of several broad business categories:
Direct Marketing, Selling, and Service. This includes brand development, direct selling, and customer service for business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer relationships. Creating site visibility, targeting offers at interested consumers, generating sales leads through a rich shopping experience, and providing responsive customer service and support are critical to online direct marketing, selling, and service. Other important considerations are secure credit card authorization and payment, automated tax calculation, flexible fulfillment, and tight integration with existing back-end systems such as inventory, billing, and distribution.
Online billing, investment services, home banking, and the distribution of digital goods and content can all be important components of direct marketing and service on the Internet. Even if companies don't rely extensively on the Internet for marketing, sales, and service, they and their customers may benefit considerably from online billing and payment. The average person receives 12 bills a month by mail from retailers, credit card companies, and utilities. Many of these billing companies are beginning to realize the benefits of sending their bills over the Internet as "e-bills." Services here may also include delivery of digital information and media. Such distribution over the Internet requires special support for retention of intellectual property rights, also known as digital rights management.
Corporate Purchasing. The Internet can help automate manual processes for most companies, making purchasing a self-service application for buyers and a trading application for suppliers. Generally this involves the procurement of low-cost, high-volume "indirect" goods for business maintenance, repair, and operations. These goods include office supplies, cleaning supplies, and replacement parts. The benefits of online corporate purchasing include lower administrative costs, improved responsiveness, and reduced inventories of supplies and replacement parts.
Value Chain. This encompasses establishing direct links with trading partners either "upstream" to suppliers or "downstream" to distributors and resellers. The Internet virtually eliminates the need for and the cost of private networks, thus opening up business-to-business communications and e-commerce to companies of almost any size. Internet trading tightens relationships between businesses to create a more dynamic value chain that reduces inventory requirements, shortens billing cycles, and makes businesses more responsive to their customers.

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