1、 1 中文 2915 字 Introduction to E-Commerce Efraim Turban, David King 1 A perfect market E-commerce is coming of age, says Paul Markillie, but not in the way predicted in the bubble years. WHEN the technology bubble burst in 2000, the crazy valuations for online companies vanished with it, and many busi
2、nesses folded. The survivors plugged on as best they could, encouraged by the growing number of internet users. Now valuations are rising again and some of the dotcoms are making real profits, but the business world has become much more cautious about the internets potential. The funny thing is that
3、 the wild predictions made at the height of the boomnamely, that vast chunks of the world economy would move into cyberspaceare, in one way or another, coming true. The raw numbers tell only part of the story. According to Americas Department of Commerce, online retail sales in the worlds biggest ma
4、rket last year rose by 26%, to $55 billion. That sounds a lot of money, but it amounts to only 1.6% of total retail sales. The vast majority of people still buy most things in the good old “bricks-and-mortar” world. But the commerce departments figures deal with only part of the retail industry. For
5、 instance, they exclude online travel services, one of the most successful and fastest-growing sectors of e-commerce. InterActiveCorp (IAC), the owner of and , alone sold $10 billion-worth of travel last yearand it has plenty of competition, not least from airlines, hotels and car-rental companies,
6、 all of which increasingly sell online. Nor do the figures take in things like financial services, ticket-sales agencies, pornography (a $2 billion business in America last year, according to Adult Video News, a trade magazine), online dating and a host of other activities, from tracing ancestors to
7、 gambling (worth perhaps $6 billion worldwide). They also leave out purchases in grey markets, such as the online pharmacies that are thought to be responsible for a good proportion of the $700m that Americans spent last year on buying cut-price prescription drugs from across the border in Canada. 2
8、 Tip of the iceberg And there is more. The commerce departments figures include the fees earned 2 by internet auction sites, but not the value of goods that are sold: an astonishing $24 billion-worth of trade was done last year on eBay, the biggest online auctioneer. Nor, by definition, do they incl
9、ude the billions of dollars-worth of goods bought and sold by businesses connecting to each other over the internet. Some of these B2B services are proprietary； for example, Wal-Mart tells its suppliers that they must use its own system if they want to be part of its annual turnover of $250 billion.
10、 So e-commerce is already very big, and it is going to get much bigger. But the actual value of transactions currently concluded online is dwarfed by the extraordinary influence the internet is exerting over purchases carried out in the offline world. That influence is becoming an integral part of e
11、-commerce. To start with, the internet is profoundly changing consumer behaviour. One in five customers walking into a Sears department store in America to buy an electrical appliance will have researched their purchase onlineand most will know down to a dime what they intend to pay. More surprising
12、ly, three out of four Americans start shopping for new cars online, even though most end up buying them from traditional dealers. The difference is that these customers come to the showroom armed with information about the car and the best available deals. Sometimes they even have computer print-out
13、s identifying the particular vehicle from the dealers stock that they want to buy. Half of the 60m consumers in Europe who have an internet connection bought products offline after having investigated prices and details online, according to a study by Forrester, a research consultancy (see chart 1).
14、 Different countries have different habits. In Italy and Spain, for instance, people are twice as likely to buy offline as online after researching on the internet. But in Britain and Germany, the two most developed internet markets, the numbers are evenly split. Forrester says that people begin to
15、shop online for simple, predictable products, such as DVDs, and then graduate to more complex items. Used-car sales are now one of the biggest online growth areas in America. People seem to enjoy shopping on the internet, if high customer-satisfaction scores are any guide. Websites are doing ever mo
16、re and cleverer things to serve and entertain their customers, and seem set to take a much bigger share of peoples overall spending in the future. 3 Why websites matter This has enormous implications for business. A company that neglects its 3 website may be committing commercial suicide. A website
17、is increasingly becoming the gateway to a companys brand, products and serviceseven if the firm does not sell online. A useless website suggests a useless company, and a rival is only a mouse-click away. But even the coolest website will be lost in cyberspace if people cannot find it, so companies h
18、ave to ensure that they appear high up in internet search results. For many users, a search site is now their point of entry to the internet. The best-known search engine has already entered the lexicon: people say they have “Googled” a company, a product or their plumber. The search business has al
19、so developed one of the most effective forms of advertising on the internet. And it is already the best way to reach some consumers: teenagers and young men spend more time online than watching television. All this means that search is turning into the internets next big battleground as Google defen
20、ds itself against challenges from Yahoo! and Microsoft. The other way to get noticed online is to offer goods and services through one of the big sites that already get a lot of traffic. Ebay, Yahoo! and Amazon are becoming huge trading platforms for other companies. But to take part, a companys pro
21、ducts have to stand up to intense price competition. People check online prices, compare them with those in their local high street and may well take a peek at what customers in other countries are paying. Even if websites are prevented from shipping their goods abroad, there are plenty of web-based
22、 entrepreneurs ready to oblige. What is going on here is arbitrage between different sales channels, says Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. For instance, someone might use the internet to research digital cameras, but visit a photographic shop
23、for a hands-on demonstration. “Ill think about it,” they will tell the sales assistant. Back home, they will use a search engine to find the lowest price and buy online. In this way, consumers are “deconstructing the purchasing process”, says Professor Sawhney. They are unbundling product informatio
24、n from the transaction itself. 4 All about me It is not only price transparency that makes internet consumers so powerful； it is also the way the net makes it easy for them to be fickle. If they do not like a website, they swiftly move on. “The web is the most selfish environment in the world,” says
