Target is aligning with technological evolution. From now on, the market research agency will be selling its publications online. This innovation shall allow its clients, decision-makers and researchers quickly obtaining Target researches under preferential costs. Blaise PEZO, IT Specialist within Target, explains how online purchases of Target products shall be carried out. Interview.     

What is the motivation that leads you to launch online sales of your publications?

For us it is mostly about allowing the maximum of people purchase our publications, especially visitors of our website living abroad. Sometimes we receive requests of purchasing, yet the current procedure (sending an invoice and payment through bank transfer) seems to be long and complex for some clients. Thus we are now solving this issue by online sales to especially allow those people living abroad having to opportunity to purchase Target publications.     

In concrete terms, how this going to be dealt with?

The purchase of our publications shall be done on the website store.target-sarl.cd with the possibility to purchase Target researches per fields of expertise (Beverages, Telecoms, Banks/Finances, Media, Surveys, New Technologies, Social, etc…). Anytime, the internet user will have the choice between a summary version that covers some contents of the related publication and an Integral Research Version that includes the entire contents of involved publication   

What is your main target – public?

This online sales’ Platform is mainly designed for anyone willing to quickly/immediately obtain any reliable and recent information on DR Congo and other African countries, whatsoever be his/her location around the world. They might be: investors, researchers, students, journalists or decision – makers (political persons as well as economists, etc…)  

What is put in place at Target level to ensure security of financial transactions supposed to be carried out through this mean?

Safe payments is actually at the very heart of our concerns. Any bank transactions through (Visa, PayPal, MasterCard and Monster) will be processed and secured. These information shall be encoded with SSL protocol (Secure Socket Layer) and will not be intercepted and modified by any third person and even Target will never have access to bank coordinates of online buyers.

Online purchasing is not well known in DR Congo and Mobile Money is more and more being used as financial messaging. How are you going to overcome these obstacles?

We are going to popularize these both means of payment on all our communication supports (website, social networks, etc.) by insisting on advantages: possibility to buy anytime of the day, direct access to information, more affordable price than hard copy support, etc. But basically, online purchasing is designed for anyone, not only internet users of DR Congo.  

Can you state that introducing online sales of Target publications does mean that ways of sales currently applied by the Agency have shown their limits?  

Target is aligning with technological evolution and would like to widen sales of its publications towards clients or prospects that are interested in them whatsoever be their location around the world. Of course we will keep on selling with current ways of sales (bank transfers and cash payment).