No one suggests that in an age that has been widely heralded as the information age, the desire for information will wane. Fuzhou businessmen, riding the tide of the information highway, have gained growing profits through a new business pattern B2B2C, or business-business-customer pattern.

In the 2010 Guangzhou Online Trade Fair held from July 9 to July 10, many local manufacturers of house decoration and those in the textile industry rushed there. But curiously enough, they sold no products.

“Actually, some manufacturers did bring their products to the fair and those products were competitively priced. But when the dealers wanted to buy, they refused,” said Zhang Hou, the president of a local handicraft company. Their refusal puzzled people, who all wondered why manufactures would deny such a chance to promote their products.

If all of it makes it seem that they lack sense of business, the answer’s a big resounding no. At the back of their minds, it pays to do “something big” in a national fair. They were thinking of persuading otheronline dealers to become their distributors in order to expand the marketing channel.

“We sent out thousands of pamphlets and a carton of business cards in the fair. It really worked. Numerous online dealer made calls and discussed details of cooperation with us. The customer services department was so busy that they had to work overtime to deal with their questions, ” Mr. Zhang smiled. He has decided to work with 45 distributors now, including those from Qinghai and Xinjiang.

One of his counterparts is much more responsive to the change. He started the cooperation from this March and the number of his agencies reached 113. With such a powerful marketing team, his company witnesses soaring sales volume in June, a figure which doubled the ones in March.

Fuzhou businessmen are wise enough to branch out their business across the country. Traditionally, a distributor has to pay a great amount of money before he can become an authorized dealer of a product. But it is not the case with Fuzhou businessmen. The initial fee is as low as one yuan. As for the delivery, they require strict time limits to reduce the costs of purchase and storage on the distributors` side.

“This pattern makes it possible to connect every industrial link of E-business,” said Wang Fang, an analyst in Iresearch, a professional organization specializing in in-depth studies of customer behavior in internet applications. B2B2C combines the existing B2C and C2C and proves to be more effective in capturing market shares. The companies are able to sell their products to customers in a more direct way and it also allows them to keep updated with the latest marketing trends. It also presents opportunities to the mom-and-pop shops that are being squeezed out by giant businesses.

By Xu Xinlei