By SARA FISHER
Staff Reporter
As gray-suited chief executives jostled elbows with blue-haired young men at last week’s Internet World, everyone was looking for this year’s “killer app” the must-have technology that would give one’s company a competitive advantage.
With more than 500 companies exhibiting their wares, which ranged from computer hardware to creative content, a lot of the buzz among the estimated 50,000 attendees centered on “e-business,” the term used to describe day-to-day business practices enhanced through technologies.
But what about last year’s buzzword, e-commerce otherwise known as online retailing?
Sales have yet to become a standard way of consumer life, held in check primarily by people’s concerns about the safety of transmitting credit card numbers over the Internet.
But many of the L.A.-area companies exhibiting software systems that allow a client to set up online sales capacities seemed to believe that a turnaround is in sight.
“More and more of my clients are turning to e-commerce with a faith that it is a coming trend,” said John Petrovich, an attorney at Brown, Raysman, Millstein, Felder and & Steiner, the only law firm to exhibit at the conference.
Craig Banner, the product manager at IMS Soft, a 19-year-old software company based in Sherman Oaks, is well aware of this.
“We’re investing now for the future, we have to consider it that way,” Banner said. “We’ve been watching and waiting for years for e-commerce to take off. What we need now is public education that e-commerce is safe and highly effective.”
Banner said his company had about 60 customers for its “open commerce integration suite,” an end-to-end software package that allows a company to set up a retail center on a Web page, an online catalog, and an automated order entry and fulfillment process.
For the moment, the company relies on its primary software product for tracking inventory databases. Banner said CompUSA is a client for that product.
“We do have Forte (the company’s original inventory tracking software) to help support us for now, but we are having a strong response to the e-commerce software here,” Banner said. “We’ve been busy all day.”
TransNet Security Inc. doesn’t have the luxury of a secondary product to keep it afloat until e-commerce takes off.
“We already have about 200 clients worldwide, mostly start-up companies,” said John Gioeli, senior vice president of Valencia-based TransNet. “Our ‘Store Front 98’ software lets a company do everything from set up a Web site to ship their goods out from a distribution center. And we’re more cost-effective than our competitors, which is why we’re so popular with start-ups. We’re at least $1,000 cheaper than other e-commerce packages out there.”
Joseph Gioeli, chief executive (and John’s brother), said their bigger clients include Liberty Mint and the Stuntman Association of America, which has an online store selling jackets, hats and other industry paraphernalia.
“E-commerce is picking up, and I think that it will pick up to the point that it is a standard feature in every retail company,” Joseph Gioeli said. However, he acknowledged that e-commerce has had a slightly slower start than expected when he decided to start his own company about a year ago.
Odyssey Venture Inc., a San Francisco market research firm, released its latest figures for personal online sales that are more modest than previously released forecasts.
The study, based on a survey of 2,500 consumers, finds that 30 percent of online households have made a personal purchase via the Internet over the last six months up 50 percent from the like period a year ago. An estimated 23 percent of U.S. households are online, the survey said.
“These findings show there is a future in online shopping,” said Elizabeth Atcheson, director of business development. “Companies involved in online shopping should be shouting with joy at the rate in which sales are picking up.”
Exhibiting companies at Internet World were certainly shouting with confidence.
That was the case with West Los Angeles-based Affinity Media Inc., which was exhibiting in Sun MicroSystems’ “E-commerce pavilion,” a cluster of companies that participate in Sun’s Catalyst Program encouraging new technology companies.
Affinity was promoting its software package that enables a secure environment for e-commerce, according to Mansour Kavianpour, vice president of product development. Similar to the other companies, Affinity also offers a comprehensive software system that allows companies to build a virtual mall and track orders.
“We have enough confidence in our product and in online retailing that we hope to attract venture capitalists,” Kavianpour said. “We actually intend to have an IPO in the year 2000.”
“All these companies really have about three years before they’re gong to see e-commerce hit a critical level,” Petrovich said. “The companies that are pressing ahead with e-commerce options now rather than just talking about it are really on the leading edge. Of course, everyone involved is obviously hoping that (online) shopping will take off sooner rather than later.”
