Just over two years ago, I was asked by a client to recommend a strategy for what was clearly going to be an area of rapid growth in Europe - electronic commerce. At the time I was investigating this myself as my own company was looking to find ways of selling products using the Internet. We were very happy to take this commission on, as we were able to get all the research we needed done and have a client pay us to do it! This is just the kind of "double-whammy" that is very much prized in the consultancy business and I was the top man in my office for landing this deal. Only about half way through my work for the client did I realise that the entire area was one that demanded more than twice the level of cynicism and at least ten times the amount of hard-nosed business dealing that everyone had up till then told me about.
In early 1997, doing business on the Internet was very much a frontier-town activity. There are those who claim this is still the case and perhaps the most amazing thing about it all was, and to some extent still is, that the worst of the outlaws in this game of Cowboys and Indians were the UK bank and credit card companies. This is a very substantial condemnation and little has happened in the intervening two years to change our view. To see why we still feel this way, you only have to compare the situation of the average UK small business that decides that the time is right to add e-commerce to the way business is done, with his cousin in the USA.
Can you imagine the scene? Our UK trader has sat down at his PC and logged onto the Internet. First of all, this guy has to be quick as he will have to pay for the call. Now I know that not everywhere in the US gets the kind of un-metered telephone deal that is almost urban myth in the UK, but there comes a point when even the most cash-rich company has to think twice about "just logging on to check my email". Almost everyone I know, and that includes me, also spends anything from half an hour to two hours at a time surfing the Web when they log on and the daytime call costs soon add up.
Typically, the first thing a net-savvy trader would do is to enter some key words into a search engine. These key words are likely to include something like: "credit card" and "merchant". As an example, in September 1999, I used the ever-popular Altavista search service to see what the result would be. It came as no surprise that over three million Web sites were returned from the simple query: "Where can I get a credit card merchant account". Is this a helpful result to our UK trader? Only if he can find out how many sites are UK related? How is a prospective card merchant to know and what if he is far from being "net-savvy"? I entered the same query to the UK-only version of Yahoo, restricting the search to just Yahoo UK, thinking that this would reduce the quantity of sites to sort through (I am not going to sort through over three million potential contacts) and got a very worrying two hits. As one of these two was a report about an Italian takeover bid and the other was a reference to a newsgroup item, the Web did not seem to be the great resource it once did. Of course, this is not the fault of the search engines, as they only reflect the sites that have registered with them, but it neatly illustrates the point that it's easy to dip your toe in the water and get overwhelmed. As a teacher once told me, "It's easy to drown trying to sip a single mouthful from a gushing fire hose".
Trying to take that one life-giving sip of water would prove even harder for my original client of two years ago. He didn't know anything about search engines and had only that week realised that the demos of flashy electronic "store fronts" shown to him on computer screens in advertising agencies were Web sites! He left it to me to find out everything I could about the subject and report back. In the next section of this article, we'll see what I learned.
