Some lateral-thinking business people believe Australian wool growers would be better off selling direct to customers online.

But the director of an e-Bay style company, Stephen Rice, said after six years of research and development, it was still struggling to convince farmers to stray from the "archaic" standard auction system. Listen Duration: 12 minutes 45 seconds 12 m Listen Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. i-Trade Wool director Stephen Rice and AWI CEO Ian McCullough talking about the wool system review on the WA Country Hour ( Richard Hudson ) Download 5.8 MB

"We took a look at this and felt that 14 levels of a supply chain with nine different opportunities of paper-based data input is probably one of the most inefficient things we've ever come across," he said.

Mr Rice believed doing business through the internet was now "ultra efficient" and said if the flow of information could be improved, all supply chain participants could save money.

"Specifically for the wool industry, you can now integrate finance and banking, freight and logistics along with warehousing and track and trace systems," he said.

Mr Rice said it was all electronic, safe, secure and highly efficient.

So far he and his business partners (including some wool farmers and brokers) had invested $1.5 million in I-Trade Wool, but after six years they had not been able to convince most farmers to sell wool online.

"This is a very old, mature, well established industry and it's like one of those great big ocean liners that will take a hundred nautical miles to turn around," he said.

Mr Rice hoped their submission to the wool selling system review (being coordinated by Australian Wool Innovation) would convince industry to sell through the internet.

"No doubt the farmers will benefit the most, but other players in the supply chain, like brokers...they would (also) benefit from efficiencies," he said.

On July 21, the wool selling system review panel is holding a workshop in Melbourne to discuss the main points raised in more than 50 submissions.

AWI chief executive officer Stuart McCullough said most of the submissions mentioned the lack of competition in the current wool selling system.

"In excess of 95 per cent of the Australian wool clip is sold through an open cry auction system. If that doesn't send off an alarm bell, then there's something wrong," he said.