E-commerce; we’ve all heard about it. It’s changed the way we do business, because it allows us to make more educated buying decisions faster. We definitely know what we’re talking about here as our internet ordering system NetXpress, is Australia’s most transacted B2B system with over 150,000 users and accounting for over 60% of all of our orders.

If you are considering conducting business with a supplier via the internet, it pays to do a little homework. For all the positives available in trading over the net, the pitfall here is forming a relationship with a supplier only to find out their ordering website is cumbersome, slow, outdated and unstable. This alone can cause 'maverick staff' to spend their time looking for a different supplier with a better system. Important attributes are speed, ease of use, images, stock availability, informative, security and most importantly does the supplier own the system. In some cases the websites are developed and owned by third parties. This can create issues with upgrades, downtime and customer sensitive information.

Internet ordering offers you a great opportunity. From your perspective you have the information you need to keep your business ticking over, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For example, logging in to an online catalogue and ordering facility means that you have access to all available products, with your specific pricing listed. There’s no need for team members to ring a Customer Service operator to get information on the product, find out delivery times or stock availability, all of that is listed right there on the web site, right there at their desktop.

Using the Internet can also decrease returns and errors since people can clearly see what they’re ordering without checking catalogues or visiting a showroom. Again, saving you time and as we all know “time is money”.

It’s preferable if a website has authorisation protocols and control processes as well. For instance in NetXpress if you want to control spending, you can restrict access to certain products and even take care of authorisation from management.