Laughing all the way to the Web

Do you think you should be offered a rebate for buying off the Web?

Some distributors are considering this and others already offer it - in their own way. Resellers that get their own pricing on the Web are likely to be getting a greater discount than if they had ordered over the telephone.

This is probably the way most distributors will go eventually, but what if you don't want to? Are you being treated unfairly?

The distributors' point of view is that what they are giving the reseller who purchases from the Web is an extra discount - not special treatment.

The distributor saves money if you order on the Web so it can give you special deals. If you want personal attention, you have to pay more to support those personnel and sometimes it simply isn't worth it. One SME dealer I spoke to said the staff some distributors allocate to them were usually a waste of time - certainly not good account managers who understood the products and spoke the language.

Ordering off the Web, I suggested, might be quicker. The dealer had not considered this and the notion that it might also be cheaper really made him think about it. For distribution, this would mean better prices - and be easier, too.

But what about the more complex products and quotations? This is what really takes up time and costs everyone money. How do we get over that?

Well, we can't easily, but that's not bad news because quoting for the whole package is part of the reseller's role.

If distributors can cut costs by getting dealers to order on the Web then it should be encouraged - especially if they then make more skilled personnel available to work with resellers on quotations. The bottom line, though, is that dealers ought to start using the e-commerce systems - it's in their best interests, after all. Yet contrary to received wisdom, the distributors are under very little pressure to make the systems work immediately. They do want resellers to use them , but they are not being forced by anyone to make the systems pay - at least, not right away.

There is an urgency about cost reduction though, particularly from the PC vendors. IBM has changed its Ts&Cs on rebates and we can expect another big PC vendor to make similar moves soon.

There will be plenty of 'handbagging' over the favours being bestowed by Compaq on various distributors over the next few weeks. In addition to the e-commerce scheme, there'll be the launch of the Compaq certified integration program (CIP), which gives some distributors the ability to assemble 'blue box' machines that run Unix and OpenVMS, cutting down on the normal delivery time by a couple of days.

These changes to the distribution routes may unnerve some resellers, but they have been inevitable for some time. It is the only way Compaq and IBM can fight Dell and, in the end, they ought to benefit both the distributors and the resellers - increasing high-value and margin-generating business for the former and cutting delivery times for the latter.

Simon Meredith is a freelance IT journalist.