Five perspectives on e-commerce success factors

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2003), "Five perspectives on e-commerce success factors", Internet Research, Vol. 13 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2003.17213caa.001

Five perspectives on e-commerce success factors

Five perspectives on e-commerce success factors

One of the wonderful aspects of dealing with a young field of research is that there is a continual flow of new ways to look at things. In this issue of Internet Research we look at e-commerce from five different perspectives, each of which considers different aspects of product, consumer, retailer, or business model.

"The state of online retailing", by Tamimi, Rajan, and Sebastianelli, presents a study of 55 online retailers identifying a number of critical success factors for e-tailing sites and mapping these findings to the four phases of an online shopping experience. The study has clear practical implications for improving Web site design and functionality. Blake, Neuendorf and Valdiserri take a different approach by focusing on innovativeness as the determining factor in online shopping environments. By examining the consumers' domain specific innovativeness with regards to both product selection and information search, this research provides new insights into the importance of product class on innovative buyer behavior.

Doherty and Ellis-Chadwick examine the specific relationship between the consumer targeting strategy and e-commerce strategy of hybrid click and mortar retailers. By studying the relationships between user demographics and product targeting strategy, the authors present clear implications through which emerging e-commerce strategies should take into account target market demographics.

We now turn to the second most popular form of e-commerce sales venue – the online auction. Halstead and Becherer study the impact of auction seller size on buyer behavior, and draw implications for marketing and positioning an auction seller to take into account buyer concerns.

Our final e-commerce related paper in this issue deals with the impact of latency on consumer behavior. Ryan and Valverde present "Waiting online: a review and research agenda". In it they clarify a number of important issues in studying the effects of performance delays. This broad review of 13 empirical studies seeks to consolidate and elucidate diverse findings into a cohesive research agenda for studying the effects of waiting online.

We then turn to the world of wireless. Lu, Yu, Liu, and Yao present a "Technology acceptance model for wireless Internet". While much of the hype surrounding the adoption of wireless Internet access may have passed, the real waves of adoption are still before us. Lu et’al. examine the factors that will influence this adoption by building a technology acceptance model around the unique characteristics of wireless Internet users, technologies, and services.

The editorial office of Internet Research is often the target of article submissions that deal with some form of survey conducted using the Internet to draw a sample. Most of these are returned to the authors with a note explaining that the use of the Internet alone is not enough to merit the interest of our readership and the title Internet Research aims far beyond publishing papers that have merely "used the Internet for research". There is, on occasion, a paper that deals with the broader question of how the Internet should be used as a research tool. Tingling, Parent and Wade have produced such a study in "Extending the capabilities of Internet-based research: lessons from the field". All too often, researchers turn to the Internet as a seemingly simple way to collect data, without properly assessing the inherent biases, drawbacks, and potential advantages of Internet-based surveys. These advantages can be achieved by looking beyond a simple mapping of paper-based surveys to the online world. I would suggest that anyone who is considering the use of the Internet as a data collection tool read this first.

David G. Schwartz