Evaluation Guide for Seafood e-Commerce Platforms

 

Seafood companies are prioritizing e-commerce platforms on their agenda for 2023. It’s an idea whose time has finally come - with so many changes taking place in availability, pricing, shipping and risk management, seafood companies are recognizing the need for a bigger, more flexible network of buyers and suppliers they trust, in order to grow their business in challenging times.

But not all platforms are created equal. Here’s a guide for seafood companies ready to test the waters of e-commerce platforms this year. Make sure you ask and understand these 6 things to know the platform you select is right for you:

 

1. Who’s allowed into the club? Make sure it’s a trusted community you’re joining. Does the platform let anyone in, or do they perform background checks first? How strong are those background checks? Does the platform suspend companies that violate the platform’s code of conduct?

 

2. How real are the offers? How does the platform ensure offers are real? One of the most frustrating parts of the online experience is pursuing an offer only for it to vanish. Don’t become a victim of companies who are more interested in fishing for your interest than buying or supplying you actual fish.

 

3. Who sees your offers and negotiations? The last thing you want is for your competitors to see your prices, or for all your customers see that you offered a better deal to your top 5 customers. Understand whether anything you post in the platform is visible to non-members, and ask for a demo to see for yourself how well you can control your own information within the platform. Remember - negotiations and final terms of the deal should never, ever, be visible to anyone but you and the buyer or supplier you transacted with.

 

4. Do you know who you’re trading with? Some platforms stand in the middle of the transaction, so you don’t know who your buyer or supplier is. Steer clear – you need to expand your network, not diminish it.

 

5. Can you try it for yourself before you commit? Does the vendor require payment up front or do they let you see the value of their platform first? Platforms are new, and all platforms don’t work for everyone. You can only decide if it works for you by trying it out.

 

6. What is the vendor like to work with? E-commerce platforms offer great advantages. But you need to be able to trust and rely on your vendor as much as you do your buyers and suppliers. Do you have access to key staff or are you just a number with no influence? Do they really listen and are they helpful?

As with buying and selling seafood, selecting the right platform requires a certain amount of diligence to make sure the platform is right and your risks are minimized.

Dealboard Returns to Conxemar

What a difference a year makes -- one year ago, Dealboard attended our first trade show, Conxemar, in Vigo, Spain.

What started as an exploratory information-gathering event turned into an overwhelming number of interested prospective customers, as the Dealboard value proposition of trust, security, efficiency, and a growing network resonated strongly with both seafood buyers and sellers.

We are returning to Conxemar again this year, October 4, 5 and 6, once again in Vigo. We hope to see you there!

This year, we look forward to seeing our current customers in person, in addition to welcoming more new members into the growing Dealboard trusted community which now includes buyers and sellers spanning 26 different countries.

Want to learn more? Send us a note at info@dealboard.biz or use this form, and we would be happy to set up a meeting at Conxemar!

Will we see you in Singapore?

 

Will we see you in Singapore? Join the conversation at Seafood Expo Asia in September!

Registration link here (it's free) -- https://lnkd.in/djDMB3dX

Our own Steve Engdahl will be moderating a panel on innovation in seafood transactions in a session on Wednesday, September 14 at 11:15.

Contact us to schedule a meeting.

How to give yourself the gift of time

“I don’t have time.”

How often do you seek someone’s attention only to hear that phrase? How often do you use that phrase with others?

In the seafood industry, where staff layers have been cut back and where margins are razor-thin, it’s customary to be extremely busy. Some may even feel a sense of importance because they don’t have room in their schedules.

But are you keeping busy with the right things?

Recall the Eisenhower Matrix, which organizes work based on urgency and importance:

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Not Important	Are you too busy here…
Important		…to have time for what’s here?

Wouldn’t it be nice to receive the gift of time? To free up your schedule to focus on more important things, and things you don’t get around to enough in your daily activities?

Negotiating seafood transactions is pretty important, and urgent, so this usually receives a lot of attention, rightly so.

But after the transaction is negotiated, what happens next? Hiding right behind the negotiation lies a host of necessary tasks which eat up valuable time. Think about all the different teams both inside and outside your company who need to be informed of the details of the transaction – logistics services, inspection services, operations, accounting, and more.

Dealboard believes you can gain back valuable time by rethinking how you connect the place where you negotiate transactions with the rest of your business. Any time you re-type something into another system or pick up the phone to recite information to someone else, you’re consuming your own time on tasks which, though urgent, aren’t the most important. To make matters worse, if you are anything less than absolutely perfect every time you do this, you might make a simple mistake and introduce an error which costs you and others even more valuable time to correct.

Give yourself and your team the gift of time by improving and automating your operations. Negotiate transactions using a platform which can automatically and flawlessly transmit the transaction details to the systems, departments and third parties who need to spring into action to fulfill it.

You deserve the gift of time.

Food Sources Under Siege: What We Knew is No Longer True

Everything which used to be reliable and stable in seafood has changed… so what's next?

Professor Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University wrote an engaging book some decades ago titled How We Know What Isn’t So. It’s about our human propensity to form beliefs which were never true.

That’s a bit different from what’s happening in the seafood industry right now, where quite a bit used to be true, but isn’t so any longer. Nearly everything traditionally reliable about the seafood supply chain has now changed.

These aren’t misperceptions. Truths we used to rely on have been thrown overboard.

Case in point:

What Used To Be So…	…What We Now Know
Our labor force would turn over, but was generally stable and returned year after year	We face constant worker shortages in plants and in ports
China’s processing industry was an insatiable source of raw material demand	China’s Zero-COVID policies idle processing facilities, killing demand
Fuel and transportation costs would fluctuate but over the long term were fairly predictable and inflation was a non-issue	Fuel costs are almost 50% higher than a year ago, influencing transportation and other costs of doing business
Growing openness between nations increased economic interdependency	War drove international sanctions, closing the Russian market to outside seafood

Is there a war on the global seafood supply chain? Probably not. Does it feel like there’s a war on the global seafood supply chain? From inside the industry, facing this volatility and the invalidation of our prior means of operating, it can absolutely seem that way.

Seafood companies need to rethink processing. We need to seek new markets to replace the old ones which are now closed. We need new trading partners who are open for business. We care about the location of trading partners more than ever before because of port and transportation cost issues.

Essentially, seafood companies need a new way to do business. And given that change seems to be the one thing which is consistent, the new way of doing business needs to enable our businesses to become more nimble than they are today – the best thing we can do is prepare our businesses to withstand future volatility.

Are you ready?

How to give all your business to your competitor

How many of you clicked that? How many of you knew not to click it?

The link above is harmless, but the next email you receive might not be. In the seafood industry we do a lot of fishing, but how much do we worry about phishing?

Phishing is the practice of sending emails which look real for the express purpose of stealing private information. Phishing emails might lure the recipient into providing things like account number or passwords, or they might trick the recipient into clicking on a file attachment which unleashes malicious code.

When your business revolves around communicating or responding to offers via email, your business is at risk for phishing. Think about it....

Do you feel like clicking on the file attachment in your next offer email? What if it launched a virus which stole all of your email contacts - your trading partners - and sent them to your competitor?

It pays to spot phishing. But here's the challenge -

This may not be a phishing email...

...and this may be a phishing email:

Can you spot the difference?

Neither can we.

The only path to phishless fish is to manage your seafood trading in a private, safe and secure platform... and not in your emails.

Negotiating the Deal: Technology’s Disservice to Seafood, Part 2

 

How do you negotiate the terms of the deal?

(price, quantity, payment terms, delivery, and more)

Dealboard’s research indicates the overwhelming majority of the seafood industry relies on text messaging – Skype, iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat and more.

Here is yet another example of technology under-serving the seafood industry, because these methods of communication introduce problematic situations for something as important as the terms of the deal for a large seafood transaction between two companies.

Problem 1: Did the Chicken or the Egg Come First?

Seafood deals require agreement on a lot of different terms and conditions, requiring exchange of many messages to arrive at an agreement.

Unfortunately, since messages cross each other, the sequence in which you see your messages may not be the same as the sequence seen by the recipient. This means you see the discussion differently.

Consider how confusing it is to rely on text messaging for something much simpler than negotiating a seafood transaction - such as arranging to meet my son for dinner later in the week. This simple task falls down under the constraints of text messaging. To understand why, read the text exchange pictured below:

What is it that we agreed to, exactly? I have no idea whether he likes the time, the first location, or the second location I proposed.

Text messaging leaves dangerously wide room for interpretation. Do you want your trading partners to misunderstand shipping information? Payment terms? Price or quantity?

Problem 2: The Single Thread

Text messaging is convenient, but it reduces communication between parties to a single thread. If you communicate with someone frequently, that's a long thread! It becomes tremendously difficult to scroll back in time to review what was agreed some time ago. 

What happens when you're negotiating with one person about the mussels, but also the cod? It is nearly impossible to keep track of which text messages relate to which product offers.

Problem 3: Privacy, and Preserving Your Margin

How many times have you, or someone you know, accidentally replied on the wrong thread? When this happens in our personal lives it's embarrassing, but when it happens in professional life you are probably giving away critical information which could harm your negotiations and rob you of available margin.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a better, cleaner way to negotiate seafood transactions that was just as easy as text messaging, but with none of the shortcomings associated with that generic technology?

That's where Dealboard comes in. Stop being under-served... learn more or sign up for a free trial at www.dealboard.biz.