Once you have decided on what product to offer (merchandise, physical or online service), you enlist the services of a communication agency to develop your Website (to add graphics, ergonomics, a payment system). It is vital to note at this stage that the role of the company which develops your Website is not that of developing your service, since you must keep control of your specialist knowledge yourself. The role of an Internet service company is simply to offer you a service which should be limited to packaging your product. If you allow him to define your service, you run the risk of giving away part of its essential value. At the present time, the confusion of these roles is extremely common, as Internet service companies claim to offer strategic advice, create your product as well as your Website, take over its technical development, run your site and do your advertising. The result is chaos : sites which take forever to load, lousy ergonomics, a total absence of strategy, poor referencing, no control over results, problems of multiple imaging, badly handled technology ... This is not surprising when we learn that the biggest European companies in this field comprise no more than 50 people : in trying to take on too much, they forget that one of the ground rules of business strategy is to learn to concentrate on your strengths, and allow other partners to provide complementary skills. The one skill that you must always keep within the company is that which is essential to your service.

Given that your initial market survey has shown that your clients are likely to visit your Website not only through their PC with Windows 95 but also by laptops like Psion, your communication agency develops several versions according to the access terminals. If your service concerns the general public, for example, you should think up a presentation for Web TV and another for Web phone.

Certain companies, which consider that the crux of the matter will soon be a perfect grasp of electronic commerce, partially integrate this element within the company : this is the case with the Trois Suisses, which has set up an in-house multimedia creation studio to meet the majority of its digital media needs. Managing a creation studio seems to be an obvious choice in this case, as the company's grasp of direct marketing, which constitutes a large part of its essential value, will progressively evolve towards online marketing, a process already widely practised by Minitel. The appearance of this multimedia creation unit, necessitated by the increasing use of new information technologies, is accompanied by the creation of a unique multimedia data base. This contains all the graphic and sound elements which the Trois Suisses will use to create its printed catalogues, its CD Rom and its Website. This approach is logical for a company which is a big consumer of commercial documents, and where this system leads to considerable savings.

For most businesses engaging in electronic commerce, the choice of integrating the packaging part of a Website in-house is not advisable, as this type of solution is only envisaged for companies of a certain size who can offset the associated investment, and only in the case where the creation of commercial documents is justified by the company's activity. Most of the time, it is far more logical to entrust this part of the work to a specialist service of this kind.

The producers

At the source of the chain, going back up the value-added chain, we naturally find the producers, spread across the different intermediary families that we've just been examining.

They remain the foundation of every economic system, now matter how virtual it may be. But what does sell in the Internet economy, what is gradually emerging ? Three groups of products may be distinguished :

· physical products (cars, shoes ...) : these goods are more and more frequently required to be produced to measure, whilst remaining part of a mass-production ethic (the term customisation springs to mind). This is the case with Kickers shoes-http://www.kickers.be. On this website, children can create their own pair of shoes by choosing exactly the colours they want for different parts of the shoes ;
· physical service (babysitting, transport ...) ;
· virtual services (online training, free e-mails, software agent consultation ...). These are the most exciting products of the new economy, and it is these which will see the greatest expansion.

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