Trade NZ online for e-commerce

By ADAM GIFFORD

Trade New Zealand wants between $10 million and $15 million in the Budget to finance its new e-commerce strategy.

Chief executive Fran Wilde says much of the money will go on educating exporters, and building and marketing a series of vertical portals (specialised sites) to give exporters a convenient way to establish an internet presence.

"This is not Incis," Ms Wilde said. "This is mainly a design and marketing programme."

Trade NZ has piloted e-commerce exporting with its DiscoverNZ.com website aimed at United States food professionals, which it supports by direct marketing.

"That site's at a lower level than we aim to eventually reach, because people can't do online deals," Ms Wilde said.

"The concept this time is to go beyond that and move into a situation where small exporters in particular cannot only do their opportunity matching online but also follow through."

Trade NZ also runs a MarketLink site, which informs New Zealand firms of engineering and construction contracts being tendered across the Tasman.

"It's market intelligence," Ms Wilde said. "Some of the Australians have been getting annoyed about the amount of business New Zealand firms are picking up because they're getting the early warning."

She said the New Zealand export economy was at risk without substantial e-commerce initiatives being put in place as soon as possible.

"Most of our exporters are small and medium enterprises whose use of true e-commerce has been slow.

"New Zealand is now two to three years behind uptake in the US and Europe.

"Our estimate is online marketing by New Zealand companies could be as low as 10 per cent.

"Many small businesses are in the trenches all the time. They're frantically doing their business and don't have the time or resources to investigate new channels."

The growth and volume of business-to-business e-commerce is far outstripping the business-to-consumer internet activity, which gets most public attention.

Ms Wilde said the sites would bring together the support organisations which enabled exporting and e-commerce to occur, from telecommunications firms to freight forwarders and customs agents.

"We will do vertical sectors by market. The fact is the food market in Japan is different to the food market in North America."

Companies will be charged to be on the portal. They will also be encouraged to manage their own information on their part of the site, which will include their company profile and online catalogues.

A decision on preferred vendors should be made by August, with the portals open for trading early next year.

"The first thing we will be rolling out by the end of the year is education. We want exporters to understand what is happening first.

"The other part of the strategy is to `e-enable' as much of our current services as we can, so we do more on the web," Ms Wilde said.

This will support services such as its export hotline and personalised account management.

She said New Zealand's export base was narrow with 9000 merchandise exporters, most exporting less than $50,000 worth of products a year.


"We have two mandates, to get more companies into exporting, and to deepen the value of exporting and make it sustainable," Ms Wilde said. "There's a lot of churn in exporters. It doesn't need much upturn in New Zealand for the little guys to say, `My home market is good enough' and forget their exports, which does nothing for their future prospects."

She said e-commerce should make it easier for firms to develop the long-term relationships international trading depended on.