InPhonic goes after small business

InPhonic today said it is launching a business version of its consumer wireless retailing site Wirefly to target small and home businesses so often missed by the larger carriers.

The new site, www.wirefly.biz, provides the same carrier/price/coverage comparisons as its consumer site, www.wirefly.com, but deals only with business-oriented voice plans and services. Furthermore, InPhonic is inversing the online-only sales model that made its consumer portal so successful, driving most of its sales to live account managers manning phone lines. While the Web site will still have all of the usual purchasing functions, it has been optimized for the single business user--a road warrior purchasing a smartphone or a data card--while the live service is geared toward the procurement manager setting up service for dozens of employees, said David Steinberg, chairman and CEO of InPhonic.

“Our sweet spot is the business with 5 to 100 employees,” Steinberg said. “We’re definitely not going after enterprises. The small business is the guy who is slipping through the cracks. He needs more attention than the retailer can give him, but he isn’t big enough for the carriers to go after themselves.”

Steinberg said the rate plans and packages the business site will offer are the identical ones offered by the carriers, including any discounts for multiple lines or bundled services. The carriers are willing to give those terms over to InPhonic because the company has shown it can effectively target small businesses while carriers can’t. The site has the advantage that businesses can compare packages across all carriers and still get the same prices they’d receive directly from the operators as well as phone discounts InPhonic itself negotiates, Steinberg said.