OREANDA-NEWS. June 16, 2011. Rietumu starts offering its corporate clients an internet-acquiring services, which allow for easy and convenient sales through the internet. The system is designed for the Europe companies that are interested in development of their electronic sales.

Ruslan Stecyuk, First Vice President of Rietumu bank

At present, every third person on the planet has access to the internet, and every second one of these people makes purchases online. It is a colossal market, and one which is growing in double digits every year. Such an overwhelming development of the virtual environment has led to the creation of an absolutely new form and organisation of sales which is totally changing the familiar concept of business and is opening doors to the global market.

Businesses are only starting to realise that any commodity, any service and any offer can be sold via the internet, where the target audience is unlimited and payment for goods takes place easily and rapidly online.

The first businesses to arrive at the internet market were the representatives of large and established businesses such as booksellers or video and DVD sellers, and companies offering clothes, household equipment, air tickets, etc. The situation is such that, due to many objective reasons, the bigger companies are less vulnerable, have the largest target audience, and can invest money into the distribution of information about their goods or services. As a result, the expenses for introducing one’s business into the virtual environment turn out to be a good investment.

However, if we look at e-commerce beyond the familiar seller-buyer framework, the internet opens unprecedented opportunities for cooperation with related businesses, thereby contributing to a new way of thinking in which, even for small companies, e-commerce becomes not only accessible, but also provides a very clear transformation for business.

The so-called business-to-business model gains a completely new perspective in this network: you can find partners, agree about partnership opportunities, and make payments, and all these processes happen within a few days, whereas in the real world the same processes can take months, if not years. Electronic cash settlements almost completely eradicate one of the most painful problems of business; the terms for payment remittances. During the good times this problem might not seem quite so important, but as soon as the slightest instability appears in the market, cash flow, or rather its management, often becomes one of the decisive factors for the survival of a business.

Moreover, internet trading considerably reduces expenses, not only due to the economies that can be made on leasing retail space, but also due to the optimisation of personnel management and the minimisation of negative consequences where they might be related to any human factor. The automation of processes, from drawing up invoices to the preparation of statistical and analytical reports, not only saves you money, but also makes these procedures faster and more accurate.

Perhaps most unbelievable aspect of it all, however, are the information capabilities of the internet. If your business has a real world point of sale then your audience is limited to the purely physical. When using the internet, every user is your potential buyer and only the information delivery mechanism is important. E-commerce really allows you to become a global player, in the full sense of the word – production in China, registration in Cyprus, the buyer in the USA. And you are in the Seychelles following the whole process in comfort.

At present, we observe how internet trading is becoming increasingly more safe: the rapid development of the internet is constantly setting new objectives for IT specialists and lawyers. To date, a great many new technologies have been successfully implemented, internet trading norms have been elaborated, and these factors have made an e-shop even more reliable than a physical one, as it cannot be subjected to shoplifting or exposed to fires or floods.

So what conclusion can be drawn from all of this? Sell whatever and wherever you want, and sell it the way you want.

By and large this is the dream of any trader. Even so, there is also a purely practical side behind this idyll - the necessity of correctly entering the e-commerce market. To put it plain, being able to find the appropriate provider and the appropriate bank. Different companies have different requirements in terms of partners, and bank commission rates may differ depending on the scale and trends of business activities, the target audience and other factors. However, this market, like any other, has its own general rules, tendencies, and levels of know-how.

To arrange a fully reliable cash settlement, there are a number of different methods in the network, including payment systems, payment by means of an internet bank or text message (SMS), and virtual money, but none of them are fully lacking in psychological and practical deficiencies.

The key to the success of e-commerce is in the comfort and beneficial conditions it offers to your buyers, but the necessity of registering accounts, logging onto the internet bank account each time, and paying commission for money withdrawal from the system all serve to kill this idea at the start and often just frighten away potential buyers. Therefore, the most perspective trend now is internet-acquiring - the possibility of receiving payments by means of a credit card.

And this is what Rietumu Bank offers to its clients - a beneficial, convenient and reliable way of performing cash transactions in the network which are of the maximum convenience for both parties, entrepreneurs and their clients.

What principally distinguishes Rietumu Bank from other companies that offer similar services, is that we are amongst a few companies on the Latvian market that have valid VISA and MasterCard licences which allow us to perform internet-acquisitions in all countries of the European Union and some other countries. The bank is ready to extend the geographic range of its operations as, with the availability of a well-adjusted system and good partners, the expansion process will not take much time.

Our approach to e-commerce somewhat differs from the policy of internet banks which prefer to divide their business by regions. The internet buyer will not feel the difference, but for a trader it brings certain inconveniences. Our clients are primarily entrepreneurs whose business has a cross-border nature. Therefore, our goal is to provide a system which fully optimises our clients’ business in such a way that internet trading becomes more convenient not only for the buyers of their goods, but also for the entrepreneurs themselves. It is the thorough optimisation of business processes that often becomes a decisive factor in attracting clients in any tough competitive circumstances.