Many online vendors are working to build a community of buyers through collaborative features such as message boards, automated notification, product recommendations and real-time text and voice chat. Such tools can help provide real-time and asynchronous support to customers as they search for products and after they have purchased products. After all, hosting the systems necessary to manage synchronous and asynchronous collaboration is more complex and expensive than simply running a Web site with static and dynamic catalog content. Downtime and availability are much more critical. This puts a burden on the enterprise to create and maintain systems that can handle these applications.
ASPs can assume some of that burden - and a few are trying to do just that.
ShopTok and eGain Communications, for example, provide the infrastructure for managing a collaborative sales environment. These two companies realize that commercial vendors may not have the staff to support live presales and postsales collaboration with customers, so they offer support personnel who are trained in a company's product line and can offer immediate service to potential customers. It's not surprising that synchronous sales environments are most popular in the vertical industries, because a community of need already exists in verticals. One thing still bothers me about collaborative environments between suppliers and consumers, however. In many vertical or niche markets, suppliers depend upon buyers or distributors to determine customer needs, and they support customers before and after product installations.