Businesses Urged To Embrace Internet

Any business that is waiting for the Internet to become a viable market place has already waited too long, say representatives of companies in volved in Internet commerce.

“Already this year a half-billion dollars in revenues that are specifically and totally oriented to the Internet have been generated,” Michael Cox, director of sales of GST Telecom Washington, told a group of Spokane business people Tuesday.

“These are revenues that would not be generated by any business without the Internet,” Cox said.

GST Telecom Washington is the Vancouver-based company that is wiring downtown Spokane with a network of fiber optic cables that will provide a fast reliable link to the Internet. GST sells that link to companies which want to operate on the Internet.

GST was one of several companies sponsoring a short seminar on “The Internet’s Impact on Spokane Business” Tuesday. The principal sponsor was Skillnet Corp., a company that, along with GST and The Fernwell Partnership, is wiring the historic Fernwell Building in downtown Spokane with the capacity to tie into GST’s system.

“The Internet is indeed the marketplace of the future,” Cox told his audience, “but it’s here now. You don’t have six months or a year to wait. You have to decide whether or not you are going to embrace the Internet, but be advised your competition is making the same decisions.”

Making that decision six months later than your competition does, Cox added, forfeits half of your potential Internet market. And that total market is projected at $6 billion by the year 2000.

Cox said the market is not just for high-tech products, but for the everyday products. The Internet, he added, provides a demographic paradise for marketers. The average Web purchaser is 35, upwardly-mobile, has a college degree and earns $60,000 a year.

Wayne Williams, president of Spokane-based Telect Corp., said his company has turned to the Internet to provide up-to-date product information to its customers. Catalogues, he said, are outdated the minute they are published and the cost of paper is significant.

But the company’s web site, which receives 600 to 800 hits a day, is a “living catalogue,” Williams said.

Skillnet will sell its job search services exclusively via the Internet. Company President Roy Massena described the Internet as the storefront of the future.

Via the Internet, he said, “Affluent people nationwide can have a low-cost, two-way conversation with your company at their convenience, using their own labor.”

For those who remain skeptical of the Internet’s ability to be an effective tool of commerce, he pointed to Amazon.com, a company that has used the Internet exclusively to successfully challenge the nation’s biggest book retailers for a share of the $26 billion U.S. book industry.

“So if you are worried about whether that school teacher in Peoria is going to trust her Visa card to the Internet,” Massena said, “you are going to miss one of the greatest financial opportunities of American business history.”

, DataTimes