Electronic Commerce: Ticketmaster Suit Begs Question: Where Should

When Ticketmaster filed its suit against Microsoft last month, red flags should have gone up among all financial services companies that are now linked or intend to be linked to information providers on the Internet.

The sports and entertainment ticket sales company took umbrage at Microsoft's links deep into its Web site. Microsoft, running an entertainment information site called "Seattle Sidewalk," enabled consumers reading about the Mariners baseball club, for example, to click on a Ticketmaster icon and link directly to the Seattle Mariners ticket sales page within the Ticketmaster site, thus bypassing advertising and promotional marketing on the pages leading up to that point. While super- convenient for consumers and providing Ticketmaster with profitable referrals, the hot link does preclude exposure to other events offered at the Ticketmaster site.

For banks-like Ticketmaster will likely have their sites connect to information providers like Investor's Edge or Microsoft Investor-the question is how links should be established. Is it wise to link through a single point of entry, where consumers are led by the financial services institution to the page they want, or via multiple points of entry such that consumers can link to specific areas, like a bank's mortgage page, auto lending page or securities trading page? "One of the grounding principles in software," says Frank Schott, Microsoft's Sidewalk general manager, "is that people like to take as few keystrokes as possible to get their work done."

Most financial players who are currently active on the Internet concur with Microsoft. "Whether consumers bypass our content and go directly to trading is OK, because we make our revenue on the trades," says a spokesman for Charles Schwab & Co., which currently has a hot link at the Microsoft Investor site.

In terms of the potential loss of additional sales because consumers are not exposed to the bank's full product offering when linking in mid- site, banks need to think of their sites as more than broadcast marketing tools, says Ira Morrow, research director of Stamford, CT-based Gartner Group. "So the issue here really is recognizing that the Internet and the technology behind it is ideal for micro-marketing." In micro-marketing, banks can, based on the products consumers have expressed interest in at their information provider sites, market complementary products when customers link to the bank site. FB