Slowly and prudently, South Florida’s brick-and-motar

Companies have been using the Net to expand their businesses. 
By John Dorschner
jdorschner@herald.com 

While the deaths of dot-coms have been monopolizing headlines for the past year, the real Internet revolution has been moving steadily along as traditional businesses quietly integrate the Web into their everyday activities. 

One local company, Ryder System, is making a massive move because it thinks the Net is perfect for its business of managing the logistics of moving goods around the world. Others --- such as Dacra Development, Lewis Marine and Baptist Health Systems – have created sturdy informational sites without wasting a lot of money. Prime example: Judith Berson, owner-manager of the 60-room Edison Hotel in South Beach, found a teenager to help her develop a spiff but inexpensive site.     

Just baby steps,” she says of the process, but it worked. She estimates that a third of her business is coming through the Web. This is definitely the trend,” says Paul Ritter, a research director with Yankee Group, a Boston-based tech research company. Firms are realizing that it’s a multi-channel world. The internet is not the channel, but an additional channel for getting business. While many dot-coms have died after building expensive and elaborate web-sites in a quest to profit purely from the Internet, brick-and-mortar firms, can afford to use the Web only to have extent that it helps their business. You have to provide an online experience that gives them value and control,’ says Henry Harteveldt, an analyst with Yankee Group. “But that doesn’t mean you have to spend millions. Spending big bucks is also a concern for companies in their back-end supply operations. Though many experts had predicted that business-to-business sites would prosper long before consumer sites did, major firms such as Royal Caribbean cruise lines and Baptist say that because of the expense of changing already-established procedures, they’re not rushing to e-market places In South Florida, the most Web-oriented sector is tourism - and for good reason. 

The sector is second in online sales only to computers, By 2005, predicts Jupiter 

Research, Web travel will account for more than $28billion annually. 

More important, says Jupiter analyst Heidi Kim, many other travelers check out the Web before they finalize their plans. Jupiter predicts that by 2005, online research will influence $92billion in offline travel purchases. 

That’s why royal Caribbean has sunk millions into a new website, which debuted Earlier this month, accompanied by an ad campaign that directs people to the Internet. 

Visitors to Royal Caribbean.com can watch movies and photos about what it’s like to cruise around the Caribbean and Northern Europe. They can experience virtu8al parasailing or swimming with stingrays. 

Our site usage has tripled in the last three weeks,” says Barbara Shrut, a marketing executive for the cruise line. 

The site allows persons to book directly, but 95 percent still prefer going through travel agents. That’s fine with the cruise line. “We know the majority are just gathering information,” says Shrut. “We want to make sure we provide it to them. That’s true, too, for the little Edison Hotel in South Beach. Berson read in an article that more than 50 percent of travelers were dong research online, and she wanted to reach them .   

CUTTING COSTS
A Web development company offered to do the job for $20,000. Instead, Berson found Merrick Reid, who was still in high school when he built a website for the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. 

Berson came up with the design, photos and music (a pop instrumental version of Miami Sound Machine’s Conga), while Reid handled the tech stuff. Cost: Between $10,000 and $20,000. 

The results: a flurry of inquiries from as far away as Poland. Slowly, Berson has improved the site. At first, visitors had to find out about pricing and availability by sending e-mails. Now, a Jacksonville company has automated that service for a mere $60a month, though Berson has to update room availability daily. 

The next “baby step” will have room availability fully automated and perhaps add a live web cam to the site.Some tourists book directly on her site. Others check out Edison’s information, then go to an online travel agency that uses the Hotel Reservations Network. HRN offers Edison rooms at a discount- and after HRN gets its slice, Berson’s take is even smaller. That’s the downside of the Internet for us,” she says. “But they can bring us customers that we’d never get otherwise.”Another company moving gradually to the Web is Lewis Marine, a Fort Lauderdale boat supply store with a catalog and three other locations along the East Coast. Lewisemarine.com has followed to owner Jim Lewis’ request to use new technology while making sure “we didn’t bankrupt the company,” says Andy Jones, who’s in charge of the website.   

SIMPLE BEGINNING 

The first version was a simple one that gave buyers the latest price updates, It was possible to order over the Net, but buyers had to refer to the catalog if they wanted to see a photo of a part, and the website encouraged them to call the 800 number for orders. 

Now, as their customers become more comfortable with using the Web, Lewis is creating a new version, which should be completed in the next several months. 

Customers will be able to track their orders over the Internet and see the whole catalog, complete with photos, through Adobe Acrobat Reader. They’ll also be able to hunt for parts with an improved search engine. It’s slow but sure,” says Jones. Meanwhile, Marex.com, a Coconut Grove firm, h as been struggling to set up a global e-marketplace so that companies such as Lewis can offer products online to buyers around the world. Lewis isn’t interested. “We’re happy where we are,” says Jones.Baptishealth.net has also been gradually evolving, from a skeletal site five years ago to today’s 2-year-old version, which provides information about diseases and treatments by sending visitors to Drkoop.com. If you want to be referred to a specialist, you must e-mail a request and wait for a reply. The communications department has more ideas. The next generation will allow visitors to make medical appointments online and schedule health classes. But cutbacks caused by Medicare reductions have slowed the changes. “Money is such an issue for us,” says spokeswoman Jill Baxter. Even so, the site gets 40,000 hits a month, “and we haven’t done a lot to promote it,” says Baxter.  

HIGH-END OPTION 

At Dacra in South Beach, developer Craig Robins says he’s spend about $40,000 to develop Dacra.com, an intensively visual site with sections showcasing planned developments and finished projects. Robins, who owns Dacra, says about half the site’s visitors are outside South Florida. Prospective customers can see a dozen images of Aqua, the new Dacra development on Allison Island, but the site could have been much more complex, with three-dimensional walk-through, videos and design-your-own tools- the kinds of bells and whistles that some money-losing real estate dot-coms have trumpeted. 

A lot of people misunderstand the opportunity with the Internet,” says Robins. “You need to first define your goal, and then execute your goal in the most cost-effective ways possible. Then there’s Ryder, which in the past two years has started a broad range of projects. One fledging operation offers a complete e-commerce back end for Net companies, “managing logistics through the entire process,” says John Wormwood, group director of e-commerce solutions.For Junonia.com (for active women size 14 and up”), Ryder handles the warehouse, checks that the buttons are sewn correctly, ships packages (via UPS and others) and allows customers to track orders. The service is used by three firms in the United States, one in the United Kingdom and one in Asia. That’s just the beginning. Rydertrac.com allows customers to follow shipments, and Ryderflow.com handles freight management for contract carriers so that if a truck delivers widgets from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Plantation, it can get cargo heading back north. Since the company operates 180,000 vehicles, it negotiates good prices on parts – a service it offers to other fleet operators through Ryderf leet products.com. When it discards its trucks after five or six years of service, it offers them to the public through used trucks.ryder.com. Ryder also owns 70 percent of Freight.com, a portal for independent drivers and small fleets, in which drivers can check out new government regulations, do freight paperwork, keep trip records, bank online, collect payments, schedule and receive jobs and get automated tax preparation. The service already has 1,000 drivers, each paying $150 a month. 

“We’ve never deviated from our basic business,” says Wormwood. “The Web is just helping us to do it better.” 

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