Opening the portal to the Internet

14 March 2000

Electronic commerce, or e- commerce, is fast becoming the way to do business. Peter Litras spoke to Ross Davey the interim president of the Chamber of Electronic Commerce - Western Victoria and Helen Thompson the project leader for MainStreet.au. What is e-commerce? Electronic commerce is the conducting and transacting of business electronically. In its broadest sense, it refers to any electronic conducting of business - so that could be by fax, by telephone, by old-fashioned electronic data interchange. Its most common use is conducting business by the Internet so, when most people talk about e-commerce, they're talking about utilising the Internet for business.

Typically it's used in a number of area - for instance, advertising and promoting your business through the Internet, a growing medium which opens up your markets to the rest of the world. Secondly, there's business-to- consumer electronic commerce which is the selling of your product to consumers. There's a wide range of businesses where you can select products, purchase them and they are delivered to you.

There are certain advantages to it - supply chains are becoming more efficient and there's an advantage for consumers, especially in remote areas. They can do their shopping without leaving the farm.

Business-to-business e-commerce is trading between businesses and that's the area of greatest potential for economic benefit to industry. What is the Chamber of Electronic Commerce? The Chamber started to provide some sort of cohesion in the region of all the e-commerce initiatives that are starting. Because e-commerce was flavour of the month, there was a tendency for people to do their own thing. That wasn't helping the region at all. The Chamber's intent was to establish a mechanism by which the whole region could participate. It's a membership-based organisation.

Regional stakeholders asked if an Internet portal - a website for the whole region - would add to the value of the region and be economically sustainable. A business case study was completed by the Centre for Electronic Commerce and Communications and one recommendation was that the establishment of a regional portal would be very valuable, if it were developed region-wide not just for one town.

How does it work? The regional portal builds on all the activities we have in the region and it's placed under the ownership of the region, not under the University, not a private company, nor under a media company. The recommendation was that the Chamber of Electronic Commerce would manage the portal. Who is in the Chamber? There are approximately 40 members at the moment. In essence, the Chamber has been established since late last year, with the objective of attracting businesses and individuals with a stake in electronic commerce. That is, they want to be champions and perhaps want to be leaders in electronic commerce - actively doing something. It's represented by a broad range of membership, including some of the smaller communities in the west - which is an important aspect of the Chamber. Smaller communities as well as the cities and towns right through the western district must be represented. How will the Chamber benefit the community? The primary benefit is to add to business that is happening at the moment - to value add to business and secondly generate new business. The first objective is to look at the means by which businesses can start transacting on the Internet to get all the advantages of broader markets. Regional businesses can make themselves competitive against other companies, which may be using the Internet to raid their markets and compete against them. The second part is the challenge to create new businesses.

Businesses can do things that have never been done before and sell products which may not have been possible before. A new business may be created out of a couple of existing businesses selling through the Internet. How will the Chamber develop in coming years? One of the objectives for the Chamber is to have more than 50 percent of businesses in the region connected to the Internet on MainStreet (the name given to the regional Internet portal). Once you have that, then you have businesses which can be found so that people outside the region can transact with them. You've also got the means by which businesses can get together and create new opportunities.

My vision is that we'll have a whole range of businesses selling their products through MainStreet.au. How do people or companies get involved? First, they apply to become members of the Chamber. Membership is $150 a year and applications can be accessed through the Centre for Electronic Commerce and Communications or online at www.cerdi.edu.au/cecwv. Secondly, they can simply purchase a poster page on the MainStreet.au portal for just $25 or where businesses have an existing web presence they can register to be searchable on the regional directory of businesses.