Competitor benchmarking Purpose To understand the characteristics of competitor web sites it is useful to know how to benchmark and to assess the value of benchmarking.

Activity Choose a B2C industry sector such as airlines, book retailers, book publishers, CDs or clothing, or a B2B sector such as oil companies, chemical companies, construction industry companies or B2B exchanges. Work individually or in groups to identify the type of information that should be available from the web site (and which parts of the site you will access it from)

and will be useful in terms of competitor benchmarking. Once your criteria have been developed, you should then benchmark companies and summarise which you feel is making best use of the Internet medium.