Websites upgraded to handle increased marketing duties

Monday, Jan. 10, 2000 | 11:14 a.m.

Cutting-edge companies that are using the Internet to sell things are changing how they use the World Wide Web to offer products and services.

No longer can they only offer an electronic bulletin board or an online catalog to stay ahead of competitors, a panel on e-commerce at the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show concurred.

CES, one of the city's largest conventions with more than 90,000 in attendance, concluded Sunday in Las Vegas.

Three companies with Las Vegas connections are among the operations that are making the transition of updating their websites to multipurpose marketing tools.

Companies need to leverage their access to millions of people to develop more "wallet share," said Suresh Shenoy, executive vice president of Information Management Consultants Inc., McLean, Va.

Businesses traditionally have offered the bulletin-board approach to show their products, Shenoy said. Some have made the transition to interactive service and transaction processing -- communicating with customers with e-mail or selling items with encrypted credit card numbers and elaborate security codes.

The next step, Shenoy said, is personalization -- developing marketing programs targeting individual customers based on their previous buying habits -- and building online communities of interest.

Some companies are already there.

Hotelguide.com, a Swiss hotel reservation company with its American headquarters in Las Vegas, has a database for worldwide lodging that is accessible on the web. Customers can access the database of 60,000 hotel properties on the Internet or can research lodging on a CD-ROM that has been distributed in travel publications worldwide.

Alisanne Frew, director of marketing services in the United States for Hotelguide.com, said customers who use the CD-ROM access a browser that will connect to the website where updated price information is available.

The software then links the user directly to the hotel's reservation web site. Frew said the system is unusual in that it transfers users to the hotel's site with a hyperlink instead of completing the reservation process at the Hotelguide.com site.

Frew said her company's advancement in Internet technology includes a plan to download photographs to hand-held computer devices.

"Hilton Hotels did an experiment with photos on their websites," Frew said. "Sales went up dramatically when they went from one to three photos on the site. It's the same way on other sites. If you don't see a picture of what you're buying, you move on."

Hotelguide.com already was developing the means to download information to hand-held devices, working specifically with 3Com's Palm Pilot. In the spring, Frew said the company would experiment with photo downloads to Palm Pilots in Germany and Switzerland.

The company already has contracts with the Rio and the Stardust hotel-casinos and has contracts pending with other Strip properties.

Several Las Vegas hotels offer their own online reservation systems.

A California company that calls itself the first online utility and plans to offer service to Las Vegas residential customers in March is using the Internet to eliminate office expenses and announced at CES that it will market a new device that will blend Internet and wireless pager technology to cut electricity bills.

Utility.com, the first company to be licensed to sell electricity in Nevada when competition begins, says that its billing system and the fact that it doesn't have a brick-and-mortar presence in the state cuts costs enough to assure a 10 percent to 20 percent savings for customers.

Chris King, chief executive officer of Utility.com, Albany, Calif, said the company bills customers by e-mail on prearranged dates each month -- cutting much of the paperwork and mail costs associated with traditional billing.

Over the weekend at CES, Utility.com announced an agreement with Lightstat Inc., Winsted, Conn., to develop and produce programmable thermostats that can be accessed via the Internet.

The $100 unit -- called CyberStat -- will give customers the ability to program their heat and air conditioning at home from work, their car or any other location.

King said the ability to manage energy use remotely would save an estimated 10 percent more on power bills.

Customers who have a CyberStat thermostat can access the settings through a secure password through the Utility.com web site. Once the changes are set, they are effected with pager technology that works automatically from the web site. Software on the site searches for a local telephone paging company to communicate with the CyberStat unit eliminating any phone costs for the customer.

King said the themostats can be preprogrammed, but the commands can be overridden from the web site if a customer's plans change.

The development of communities of users is the key strategy behind the success of Las Vegas-based PurchasePro.com Inc.

The company develops "e-marketplaces" of users in the procurement process to bring business buyers and suppliers together via the Internet.

Charles "Junior" Johnson, chief executive officer of PurchasePro.com, started the company with procurement between Las Vegas resort properties and their suppliers to buy everything from linens to food products. The system, company officials said, puts small operations on equal footing with corporate giants.

Key to the company's strategy is to develop sales and marketing relationships, which it now has with Sprint, Office Depot Inc., the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and the American Association of Franchisees and Dealers, among others.

Last week, PurchasePro.com announced it hired former Hawaiian Airlines and Continental Airlines executive Bruce Nobles to develop the company's online procurement approach in the transportation industry.

Although the CES panelists discussing how e-commerce is progressing noted many successes, one speaker warned companies to be sure they were ready for the high volume of customers that could be generated.

Darryl Peck, chairman of Cyberian Outpost, said his software company had all its shipping arrangements in order before it went live on the Internet and it was able to ship and deliver before Christmas right up until the evening of Dec. 23. He blasted Toys R Us and its online Toysrus.com web site for being unable to deliver products by Christmas after Dec. 6 last month.

"It tells me that there are some companies out there that haven't figured it out," Peck said. "To be so clueless about delivery tells me they haven't prepared properly" and it hurts the credibility of e-commerce, especially among customers using it for the first time.

But Hotelguide.com's Frew came to the defense of Toys R Us.

"I think they actually did a fine job," Frew said. "It says that the demand was greater than expected.

"And there's a lot more to come," she said. "In the next three years, our experts have told us there will be an 80 percent increase in the amount of technology used over last year. That's a good indication of where things are going with the 'Net."

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