A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Part 1  Introduction

Place of purchase

Examples of sites

A   Seller‑  controlled

•  Vendor sites, i.e. home site of organisation selling products, e.g. www.dell.com

B   Seller‑  oriented

•  Intermediaries controlled by third parties to the seller such as distributors and agents,  

e.g. Opodo (www.opodo.com) represents the main air carriers

C Neutral

•  Intermediaries not controlled by buyer’s industry, e.g. Alibaba (www.alibaba.com)

•   Product- specific search engines, e.g. CNET (www.cnet.co.uk/)

•  Comparison sites, e.g. MoneySupermarket (www.moneysupermarket.com)

•  Auction space, e.g. eBay (www.ebay.com)

D   Buyer‑  orientated

•  Intermediaries controlled by buyers, e.g. Covisint used to represent the major motor

manufacturers (www.covisint.com), although they now don’t use a single marketplace, but 

each manufacturer uses the technology to access its suppliers direct

•  Purchasing agents and aggregators

E   Buyer‑  controlled

•  Website procurement posting on company’s own site, e.g. Deutsche Telekom Corporate

Procurement portal (www.einkauf.telekom.de), which controls part of the company’s 

purchasing budget

Source: Adapted from McDonald and Wilson (2002).

Table 2.3

Different places for online representation

journeys for customers with different channel preferences. It can be used to assess the cur‑

rent and future performance of these different customer journeys. An example of a channel 

chain is shown in Figure 2.9. A market map can show the flow of revenue between a manu‑

facturer or service provider and its customers through intermediaries and new types of inter‑

mediaries. Thomas and Sullivan (2005) give the example of a US multichannel retailer that 

used  cross‑  channel tracking of purchases through assigning each customer a unique iden‑

tifier to calculate channel preferences, as follows: 63%  bricks‑  and‑  mortar store only, 12.4% 

 Internet‑  only customers, 11.9%  catalogue‑  only customers, 11.9%  dual‑  channel customers 

and  1%   three‑  channel  customers.

Figure 2.9

Example channel chain map for consumers selecting an estate agent to 

sell their property

Search engine

Word-of-mouth