Most of the hoopla about the Web is focused on consumer sites. But a new study from Catalog Age magazine’s i.merchant supplement shows that the real Web masters are business-to-business companies.
According to i.merchant’s listing of the top 40 companies on the Web, B-to-B firms account for 73% of the $33 billion in revenue generated by this group in 1998. (The list includes multichannel firms and companies that market only online. The rankings are based only on online sales.)
B-to-B companies top the list for several reasons, among them: their early adoption of technology, the broad depth of their available resources, and the large price tags of B-to-B products.
Of the 40 leading merchants, 60% sell computers and computer-related products, and roughly two-thirds of that segment sell to business customers. Companies that made the list include network systems company Cisco Systems, Intel Corp. and IBM.
Apparel and general merchandise sellers accounted for 15% of the top 40, while book, music and gift merchants accounted for 8%.
On average, online revenue accounted for 36.3% of these firms’ total revenue. It represented more than 50% of total revenue for 11 merchants, and 10% or less for 17 companies.
Meanwhile, a new study from the Direct Marketing Association reports that 85% of all catalogs have a presence on the Internet. Heading the list are firms that market to both consumers and businesses – 94% report that they have a presence.
Seventy-nine percent of consumer-only firms have a presence, compared with 71% of B-to-B companies, according to the survey done by the DMA with W.A. Dean & Associates.
Thirty percent of the companies on the i.merchant Top 40 list can also be found in Peppers and Rogers Group’s (PRG’s) Best Practices of the Top 1to1 Web Sites (April 1999). However, unlike the majority above, eight of the nine customer-focused companies listed by Peppers and Rogers sell primarily to consumers.
The i.merchant study was compiled from public records, input from industry sources and, when possible, from information provided by the companies themselves.
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