2.3.3　Search Engines搜索引擎

A study by Google and Millward Brown^[1]shows,42% of international buyers take search engines as their first choice for sourcing suppliers.11% of them source products from a suppliers’website,10% by word of mouth and 7% through B2B platforms.To exporters,search engines rank the most important avenue to prospects,as almost every company engaged in international business maintains a website,a blog,a social media account,or any other kind of company profile that contains their contact information.To get this information,you may start with searching the Internet with one or a combination of key words,mostly your product name plus additional information,which may yield websites of trading companies for import and export,distributors or retailers.Most websites contain an email address or other sorts of contact information,from which you can write emails or make contacts by other means to establish business relationship.Don’t forget to try some sophisticated searching techniques,such as searching for prospects in a certain country by using the key word of the product together with the suffix of the domain name unique to that country.For instance,if you want to search for dealers of tents in Germany,you can type in “Zelt .de”in the search box of the search engine as “Zelt”is the translation of “tent”in German.You may also integrate search engine with other techniques,such as starting with a search for trade associations,trade fairs or online yellow pages instead of individual businesses.And be aware that certain countries or regions may have their own preferred search engines,such as Yandex for Russia,East Europe and West Asian.