ePortals for Global Trade: Survey of National Initiatives

The need for transacting outside a domestic country for a business has become imperative in this competitive world. Transacting with a foreign country, however, involves risks and uncertainties for a business, the types of which perceived differ depending upon factors such as experience and financial strength of a business. Governments, whose existence is funded by the taxes paid by the businesses, are geared up more than ever before for assisting businesses in venturing into foreign markets and in expanding further. Traditionally, export assistance services, which is largely informational in nature, has been provided by government organisations using surface mail, telephone, fax, personal meetings and electronic files. Since the Internet gained prevalence the traditional methods used for providing export assistance service have clearly become ineffective. Having recognised that, in the recent years, most of the organisations providing export assistance deliver services over the Internet. Although export promotion is an actively researched area since the 1970's, relatively little work has been done for documenting the recent Internet related developments. Through a survey of export promotion sites of some 25 representative national sites, this report identifies various criteria common to excellent export promotion sites. Taking the time dimension into account, a dynamic process model is proposed for developing effective web strategies, which is applicable in all contexts. For developing the strategy model, knowledge about conventional export promotion techniques are taken into account. Hence, the proposed model can be viewed as an extension of research work done in the area of export promotion. The report provides a description of various types of export promotion sites. Of all the sites surveyed, the one representing Hong Kong is found to be the best. Special attributes of many other sites are inserted in bits and pieces in the report. Finally, research directions are provided for furthering the knowledge in this nascent field.