Early pioneers of web based trading have been introducing online shops for timber products for several years. Many businesses use EDI and XML to exchange business documents. However, there has not been the widespread adoption of web shops as a common business tool.

While there are auction and trading websites for bulk timber sales, the retail web shops have been slower to market. Retail web shops address merchant sales to trade and retail customers, equivalent to Amazon, or a supermarket web shop, but tailored to the sophistication required for timber sales.

Not having a web shop until now has been reasonable as there have been market and technical factors restricting their introduction within the timber trade. The most obvious in the past was slow access to the internet, but today over half of UK households and two-thirds of small businesses have broadband (source: Ofcom Internet & Broadband Update). This changes how people use the web, making it easier just to dip in to check something out, rather than have a dedicated online session as with old dial up connections.

Consumer confidence

Now that broadband is widely used, consumers are gaining confidence in what they will order online. The first successes were the sales of simple unit products, that were branded to guarantee quality and were easily delivered – hence the growth of online book and DVD sales (in December 2006 Amazon despatched 500,000 items a day). Since then, more complex online models have been introduced, supermarket shopping, insurance sales and online banking, all advancing what is possible via the internet.

Once it is established that there are customers willing and able to use a web shop, what are the technical hurdles to making one work for the timber market?

Many merchants sell to trade customers on a credit account, recognising the customer because the order has been delivered on letterheaded paper, they have spoken on the phone, or the customer is in front of them – a web shop would have to get the customer to log in to establish who they are. Simple enough, but how many people from your customers can place orders? Do you get the customer to tell colleagues his login and password, or does your web shop need multiple users per customer?

Leading on from user logins is the display of information. Many companies view stock and pricing information as sensitive. Stock can be displayed in generalised terms (ie not that there are 16 sheets in stock but that there are 10-20), and without negative stock figures, referring to those products as “more coming soon”.

Product pricing

Product pricing on your current trading system hopefully accounts for who the customer is, the quantity they’re buying, delivery method, and special agreements. Translating this onto an online system is challenging, leaving a choice between a live link between your current trading system and web shop, or simplifying price structures for when a customer opts to order online.

One of the key features that makes a specialist trading system, like our STRIP5 software, so successful is the ability to enter products using multiple units of measure and converting the price to other relevant price units instantly. When selling timber should the user be able to enter multiple quantity measures, from a total volume to a detailed length specification? The supermarkets have got round their sales of loose fruit and vegetables by bagging them in fixed quantities, so you buy a bag of four apples, but cannot choose to buy one, two or three loose apples. Could something similar work for timber?

All these challenges may have held the market back, but the tide of market expectation and technical ability is turning. The benefits of an extra method of selling, that adds to your current sales effort without additional manpower and keeps trading outside normal working hours, has got to be appealing.

There are complexities to timber trading that are not best addressed by a web shop. For those sales, customers will continue to phone or visit to discuss the details with experienced staff – but there must be simple, repeat sales that could be handled online. Are we now ready to deliver more to our customers via a web shop? I hope the answer is yes.