About 18 months ago I purchased a small, new car online for my son. I needed to go through this experience to see if I could trust a £7,000 purchase on the internet, otherwise my hopes for TIMBERWeb would be fantasy. I’ll tell you later what happened!
TIMBERWeb started seven years ago as a forerunner of community-style websites focusing on a single industry but positioned globally. This term ‘positioned globally’ almost sounds ludicrous when you consider it was effectively a file on a computer with two people on a telephone trying to interest companies in paying to be a member of a club for anyone in the world involved in timber. Plus it was a novel concept. There are thousands of trade or product-related associations, institutions or research-oriented communities but there was no one focal point of networking for the global timber industry.
The concept of trading timber online is actually no more difficult to conceive than buying an airline ticket by credit card and trusting that when you check in they will recognise your booking number.
The TIMBERWeb e-trading concept started as the BT Global Wood Trader, which offered a traditional trading process of placing timber offers and requirements and allowing users to make offers, counter offers and eventually a contract.
The Global Wood Trader was superseded by a reverse auction based system. Along with many others, TIMBERWeb believed that sellers would compete to the ultimate benefit of buyers in a traditional Dutch auction process. Buyers would place an enquiry and sellers would have to offer within a fixed time. Buyers would have to either accept the lowest price or in certain cases be able to choose which buyer they wished to contract with. This was a game which sellers were reluctant to play since they perceived they could only lose.
E-trader benefits
The latest version of eTrader balances the benefits between buyers and sellers. A key feature is that it recognises that most buyers and sellers want to keep negotiations private. It also allows users to build a private record of all communications leading to agreements and to make an agreement ‘subject to contract’ if they prefer. Users can catalogue regular requirements and offers and post publicly at the click of a mouse. They can also refine searches to a wide variety of criteria.
Thousands of cubic metres are offered or requested every day on TIMBERWeb. Since it was established as the first post and browse system of its kind, over 20,000 offers or requests involving millions of cubic metres of timber have been posted onto the eTrader centre.
E-mail explosion
The past year has seen an explosion in the use of e-mail for trading and networking. Many companies have also developed excellent websites, but a lot are hidden in the vast expanses of the internet. Without a signpost, they will only be found by those who know they are there. The coming year is likely to see growing awareness of the importance of key positioning on the internet to create new business and markets; those who become members of ‘focused communities’ will get the required traffic to their site, those who don’t, might have been better to spend their money elsewhere.
I believe also we will see increased trust and courage to try to make true online deals.
Going back to my car purchase, it was an incredible success. I saved £600 on the best cash offer from the local dealer and even organised a trade-in of the old banger and delivery to Durham. The dealer conceded that Vauxhall’s web strategy did cut the dealer in for a small percentage for customer support but this didn’t stop him banging his head on the table saying “I can’t compete – thank God not everyone has found Vauxhall’s website!”.
I conclude from this that buyers and sellers, big or small, will increasingly benefit by positioning themselves on e-markets as more timber buyers trust to purchase truck loads of timber an easier way. Traditional timber agents will evolve as have travel agents and motor dealers, perhaps taking a role more akin to a principal, or staying true servants of the bigger organisations.
Companies that steer away from the internet could lose sales to those who reinforce their brands online and are more flexible and exploratory in their trading methods.
