World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
When talk of electronic commerce first appeared, the imminent demise of the shopping mall, superstore and other brick-and-mortar retailers was envisaged. Thanks to the advent of ''multichannel'' or ''convergence'' retailing, the opposite seems to be happening.
E-commerce, with a 175 percent annual growth rate over the past three years, is the fastest-growing sector in the torrid Internet market. Jupiter Communications sees the annual volume of e-commerce in the United States increasing by 240 percent over the next three years. The Gartner Group forecasts the number of Web pages offering products and services to rise to 2 million during this time.
On-line retailers can attribute a good part of this rise to the surge in business. Another reason may be the rush by retailers to set up Internet-based sales arms and information platforms - a practice known as multichanneling. Paralleling this trend has been the establishment of ''convergent'' alliances between e-commerce companies and brick-and-mortar retailers in which product lines are converged and made available for purchase both on the Net and in physical stores. The ideal mix is when on-line companies' Web savvy meets the brick-and-mortars' large customer databases and efficient order-fulfillment services.
Amazon.com, in announcing its latest zShops venture, is perhaps the most cutting-edge example of this retail innovation. Amazon will offer merchants the opportunity to list their shops on the company's popular Web site for a $9.99 monthly fee. The ''store'' in the Amazon ''mall'' then gets access to some of the Internet-based marketing tools Amazon has developed, including what the company calls relationship marketing - someone searching for a book on the Beatles may encounter a pop-up window on the hit page from a shop selling vintage electric guitars - and one-click shopping. Amazon expects to significantly widen its information database of customer shopping habits with zShops.
Web weaving
Profiting even more from the Web are the little guys armed with a home PC and access to interesting ranges of products or services. These prospective e-merchants must construct their Internet storefronts and find service providers that can get their businesses on-line. Web sites from companies such as Comercis help merchants create a storefront in a few minutes. Providing the same capability, albeit with varying degrees of complexity and sophistication, are programs such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver, NetObjects' Fusion and Elemental's Drumbeat 2000 - Web-site design programs that are increasingly offering built-in storefront-building capabilities.
Internet service providers are gearing their products toward smaller businesses. France Telecom, for example, offers Wanadoo Pro to small companies in France that want to be on-line. Packages include space for Web pages, procurement of domain names and listings on their popular Voila.com search engine.
Terry Swartzberg