B2B Portals Transform International Trade to Simple Trade

Every entrepreneur's dream is to graduate from one's domestic trade level to international trade and thereby increase one's profit margins manifold. Until few years ago this remained as a distant dream, but today it has been made a reality by the opportunities created by ingenious services provided by Business to Business (B2B) web portals. B2Bs have a database of exporters and importers around the globe and any legal business entity regardless of size can register in these portals.

These portals provide two types of memberships, free membership and premium membership. Free membership is a trial version made available to the trader to understand the functions of the portal. But the premium membership gives maximum visibility and interactive facility to the trader to divine the desired result in a short span of time.

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History shows us that international traders used to just leave their places with their products or services, in search of new markets without any prior knowledge of the risks involved. Any such exploration in those days found success through sheer luck and these expeditions were not without any shortcomings either. They included risks related to expenditure, time and most importantly, lives of the people involved in the whole exercise. Those days, even after making a successful landing in a foreign territory, the traders had to encounter various issues like, language, socio-cultural differences and trading practices.

As the civilization evolved to the modernity of the present world, trading too got organized. With the deployment of modern trading practices in businesses around the globe enabled each and every trader to speak the universal language of business. Thus the trader was further able to de-risk the ill-effects of issues related to language, socio-cultural differences and trading practices. Moreover, the traders were emancipated from the fears of losing everything while foraying into new markets. Even though, the barriers for international trade vanished one by one, a seller to find a suitable buyer or vice versa beyond one's market became a gargantuan task. During this period businesses survived solely on the basis of self network and through market to market publicity programs which involved enormous expenditure.

But B2B portals revolutionized the way the world is doing business right now. They are emerging as the next growth engine of Information Technology. B2Bs are the only interactive advertising tool and low cost trading tool available in the world of business today. The leading B2B portals are with a vast database of exporters and importers across the globe. B2Bs help especially small and medium enterprises to showcase their products or/and services in the world stage economically.

Skeptics of B2B's still use their self networks to do business, by completely overlooking the expenditure, time and emotions incurred as a social obligation for the favors rendered to their self networks in the course of time. But when you become a premium member of a B2B, parties involved in the process only have to honor the business relationship. Those who suspect the authenticity of leading B2B portals either have used the services in the formative years of B2Bs' existence or have never used them at all.

The rental of a city hoarding for a month will cost more than the subscription amount currently charged by any leading B2Bs per annum. The kind of response one receives from such hoardings is subjected mainly to the place where it is displayed and various other factors. As a matter of fact, hoardings and similar advertisement strategies make one to be in one's office in anticipation of business.

On the contrary, the B2B portals' premium memberships play dual role, one is that of the interest generated for one's products or/and services through the above strategies and the other is that one can approach the traders in the related field without incurring any extra cost. Due to globalization, even domestic markets across the world, is becoming virtually an international market. To conclude, if a trader does not use the premium services of the B2Bs, it would be very difficult for one to survive in the prevailing competitive globalized market.

B2B Portals Transform International Trade to Simple Trade

Toboc, a b2b portal, provides global trade platform for Importers and Exporters from the different regions of the world. Visit us at http://www.toboc.com

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B2B Portals - Importers and Exporters Directory

Today, the complete world is going around the trade. At present, the scenario of import and export has changed. Internet has made the world, a smaller place. These days, almost everything is available over the internet. You can easily find the list of importers and exporters on various B2B portals and grow your business.

A Business to Business (B2B) marketplace is an Internet marketplace where various exporters, importers, traders, brokers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and other business communities meet together from all over the world and finalizes different dealings regarding buying and selling of various products. A B2B portal also provides the importers directory and exporters' directory which has the exhaustive list of importers and exporters.

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The procedure to deal with importers and exporters directory is very simple. Here, sellers need to post online trade leads and buyers need to post their ads as interested buyers. Sellers will be looking for pre-qualified buyers. If the buying offer of a company or an enterprise meets the products or services of a seller, the chances of a confirmed sale and a long lasting business relationship is almost guaranteed.

There are various advantages of importers and exporters directory because it provides various national and international business services. It not only reduces transaction time and cost but also reduces supplier costs, generate new business contacts, and increase sales. They also help in generating trade leads and business leads. Also, International trade leads come around quite frequently and in most cases, instantly. In other words, it facilitates all the business needs for all importers and exporters.

Nowadays, people have a very busy and tight schedule. They can not afford time-consuming shopping. So, they look for an alternative for comfortable and easy shopping. Therefore, they don't mind paying a bit more for their purchases. This is where the importers directory and exporters directory come into demand and in great picture.

B2B Portals - Importers and Exporters Directory

The authoress is a business writer specializing in international trade and has written authoritative articles on the trade and commerce. She has done her masters in Business Administration and is currently assisting The Mall of India. Visit at The Mall of India to know more about importers and exporters directory.

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The Changing Trend - Self-Service Portals

Portals were preferred over other content websites to provide consolidated, customized and updated information. The trend moved towards one-click information on weather, cities, movies, music, communities, latest news, stock update and much more with customized and personalized user web space. Users started expecting the possibility of paying bills, checking bank accounts, transferring funds, city information and tracking insurance claims through a secure online platform. Users, no longer, wished to be caught in the slow and lengthy request-processing loop offered by call centers.

Highly acclaimed community portal, Yahoo, introduced the user-centric personalized portal My Yahoo! in 1996. Users needed to create a profile to access a gamut of information through a personal web space. The users experienced up-to date view of information streamed on the basis of their preferences. Self-service portals, thus, evolved a user-centric web-based platform approach. It enables an anywhere anytime model with data integration from multiple sources facilitated through an open architecture. Users can access instant information through a personal web space where they can even specify their preferences to view specific data categories. With Service Oriented Architecture enabled, the information can be accessed through PCs, mobile phones, PDAs and other channels. With online self-service model, companies significantly saved on customer services.

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Customer Self-service Portal is targeted to meet the specific requirements of the B2C domain. It provides an end-to-end solution for E-commerce activities enabled through a single sign-on personalized platform for users with data and applications accessible on-demand. The end-users are provided with extensive information streamed through a wide network of sources. The information is then processed and collated into precisely the data requested by the end-users.

The overall costs incurred with toll-free phone support, emails and chat sessions amount to much more than self-service portal. Intelligent data analysis is provided by sophisticated aggregation and integration functions of portals. The advanced analysis capability enables easy identification of potential customers by capturing user-browsing behavior. 'Customer lifetime value' can be enhanced with personalized and instant interface. It also optimizes the business environment for remote and local collaboration of data, software and applications. Portals are designed to manage large data requirements like integration, storage and data processing.

With rapidly growing demands of an increasing customer base, the customer-servicing costs have become unaffordable. Dependence on human interface and contact centers is reducing due to deteriorated services and high costs. The late 90s experienced changing trend in the way customers wanted to be served. Growing complexity in businesses led to a massive increase in the number of processes, applications and user database to be maintained. Data being stored at multiple locations consumed more time to integrate. With number of users increasing and complexity of processes growing, companies outsourced their customer services to multiple call centers. The costs and the dependence on human interface, thus, added tremendous burden on company funds whereas quality of customer servicing continued to drop. Users expected faster services and access through multiple channels like the Internet and mobile phones. From an IT perspective, this translates into data integration across the enterprise and web-based customer and employee portals founded on the fundamentals of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

The Changing Trend - Self-Service Portals

Roopal is an Online Marketing Professional from http://www.infogain.com, an IT Services Company, writes blog, content, and articles. She writes marketing col-laterals and advice to Visit her web page for your concerns regarding Self Service Portals and for Retail POS Systems

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Web Portal And Web Portals Functions

What are the Major Functions of Portals?

The ideal portal is based on following functionality areas:

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- search and navigation

- personalization

- notification

- task management and workflow

- collaboration and groupware

Although most of the functionality is not new, what is new is the idea that the business value of the whole is considerably more than the sum of its parts. Thus, a successful portal does not only consist of either a good collaboration support or a good integration of the information sources. Rather it consists of - just like a successful cooking recipe - a well-integrated mixture of the basic portal functionalities.

Search and Navigation

This functionality forms the basis for most of the successful public web portals meaning that a successful portal should support its users in an efficient search for contents.

A portal should:

- automatically present its users with the information appropriate to the user's role

- suggest additional information to the user, and/or allow the user to voluntarily personalize the information presented by the portal

- allow the user to search for information that was not previously known to be relevant to the user's role, but which may be available through the portal

Provide Personalization

Personalization is vital to the delivery of appropriate information to portal users: each user gets only the information which is specifically tailored to his/her needs. Personalization should be based on user roles, as well as user preferences.

There are several types of personalization:

- Personalization of navigation

e.g. shortcuts to specific information, mostly known as bookmarks or favorites

- Personalization of data/content

e.g. which stocks do I want to see in my stock ticker

- Personalization of layout

e.g. what information appears where on the screen, in which format, color or size

An important high-level distinction exists between:

- Design personalization

the initial appearance of the portal, which may be 'pre-personalized' according to the user's role

- Voluntary personalization

where the user is offered a menu of personalization options to choose from

- Involuntary personalization

where the system itself unilaterally makes decisions for the user according to 'guesses' about user preferences.

On a Web site, personalization is the process of tailoring pages to individual users' characteristics or preferences. Commonly used to enhance customer service or e-commerce sales, personalization is sometimes referred to as one-to-one marketing; because the enterprise's Web page is tailored to specifically target each individual consumer. Personalization is a means of meeting the customer's needs more effectively and efficiently, making interactions faster and easier and, consequently, increasing customer satisfaction and the likelihood of repeat visits.

Provide Notification

Notification (push technology) is referred to as a system in which a user receives information automatically from a network server. Push technologies are designed to send information and software directly to a user's desktop without the user actively requesting it. Thus, the user has the opportunity to subscribe to active information sources (such as news feeds and periodically updated reports) and ask to be alerted when documents are updated.

Provide Task Management and Workflow

Portals providing task management services can help users take part in and/or manage formally defined business processes.

The workflow functionality allows the automation of business processes. Thus, as part of a workflow-automated business process, a portal should be able to prompt its users when they have tasks to perform.

E.g. Digite Application

Provide Collaboration and Groupware

Knowledge management and groupware ensure that the required information is stored in the right place and in the right mode. By this means the right persons are brought together with the right information. Groupware software assists in less formal collaboration than workflow tools. As with workflow automation, groupware increases the value delivered by many types of specialized portals; for example, it:

- increases the attractiveness of business-to-consumer e-commerce portals

- enables informal communication between suppliers and customers in business-to-business e-commerce portals

Supply chain portals are also dependent on collaboration support in order to help suppliers and their customers manage their relationships. Moreover, collaboration support is a key requirement for knowledge portals.

Web Portal And Web Portals Functions

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The Importance of Web Portals

Web portal design is basically the most beneficial access point for the user of the web as they can easily go from one page to another navigating the information of their choices. All the portals have the information stored into links to various topics such as news, business, sports, entertainment, finance, travel and much more. Yahoo!, Google, AOL are popular portals on the internet. However, these portals can be called as personal portals as they store user's history data, profile information, emails and so on. But there are other kinds of portals too!

The technologies are highly dynamic in nature and therefore the development of the web portal software led to the expansion in terms of its interface which can include corporate databases as well. This kind of portal is popularly known as enterprise portal or business portals.

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The online portal technology has enabled the lot many advantages as it is faster, user friendly and easier to access various products and services. Not only this, but the enterprise portals have improved communication and response time as well. The usage of an efficient enterprise portal can add immensely to the overall productivity of the organization. Hence, the enterprise portals are becoming very essential for organizations of all sizes.

A corporate web portal design that works for the consumers and employees at the same time is also developed. This can help immensely in doing transactions easily and in a flexible way as it can maintain book-keeping and inventory keeping efficiently. Thus, it makes the work for the customer and the employee simple and easy. The easy accessibility that the web portal has the better it is for the user as they will return to the site quite often.

The Importance of Web Portals

For More Information: Enterprise Portal.

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