Talk:Business-to-consumer electronic commerce
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b2c e-commerce
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With regard to the advantages of B2C, I would make a distinction between the advantages for the customer, and for the retailer/company. The work of Wolfinbarger and Gilly (2001/ Californa Management Review) is useful for explaining the motivations or reasons to shop online. They conducted in-depth interviews and concluded the following:
Wolfinbarger and Gilly (2001) suggest that online shoppers are mainly goal-oriented shoppers that achieve greater freedom and control in the online environment, as they experience little pressure to purchase before they are absolutely ready. Online shoppers' motivations to shop online include (1) convenience/accessibility, (2) selection, (3) availability of information, and (4) lack of sociality. - Convenience/accessibility: Despite some inconveniences (e.g. difficulty of assessing quality online, insecurity about payments and postponed gratification), online shoppers generally indicate that shopping online is easier than offline due to the ease of access and comparison shopping (e.g. Bobbitt and Dabholkar 2001; Childers et al. 2001; De Ruyter et al. 2001; Monsuwé et al. 2004; Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2001; Yoon 2002; Zeithaml et al. 2002). - Wide selection/special items: Online shoppers also address that the wide selection is a motivation to shop online (Srinivasan et al. 2002; Szymanski and Hise 2000; Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2001; Yoon 2002). For example, the number of books available at Amazon.com is more than 23 times larger than the number of books of a typical Barnes and Noble superstore (Brynjolfsson, Hu and Smith 2003). - Wide availability of relevant information: The wide availability of relevant information helps buyers to make more informed decisions (cf. Chen and Dubinsky 2003; Loiacono et al. 2002; Szymanski and Hise 2000; Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2001; 2003; Zeithaml et al. 2002). With the help of online recommendation tools, consumers can drastically reduce their search costs and make better decisions (Häubl and Trifts 2000). - Lack of sociality. Online shoppers sometimes prefer to shop online because of the lack of sociality (Dabholkar and Bagozzi 2002; Nicholson et al. 2002; Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2001). They may prefer online shopping, as they believe offline shopping is too slow due to the anticipated inefficiency of service employees or the unwanted verbal interactions that could take place.
Reasons preventing shoppers to shop online: - lack of sociality. For some shoppers it is a motivation to shop online, whereas for others the lack of sociality is seen as an inhibitor to shop online; consumers may want to speak to an employee when a complex product is purchased (Black et al. 2002; Francis and White 2004), or want the opportunity to interact with family and friends when hedonic products are purchased (Nicholson et al. 2002). - increased risk: In the online environment, the physical and temporal distance between consumers and retailers create additional uncertainty, because product characteristics and retailer identity cannot be fully assessed during the transaction (Ba and Pavlou 2002; Jarvenpaa and Tractinsky 1999; Pavlou 2003) and because of the greater ease of cheating online (Einwiller 2003; Gefen 2000; Reichheld and Schefter 2000). In online environments, consumers have fewer tangible and verifiable cues regarding the retailer’s capabilities and intentions (Urban, Sultan and Qualls 2000), leading to higher risk perceptions. Although the transaction appears to be fast and convenient, the background processes such as order flow, price discovery and order execution remain largely inscrutable (Konana, Menon and Balasubramanian 2000). Not surprisingly, privacy and security concerns are frequently mentioned as inhibitors of online shopping (Swaminathan, Lepkowska-White and Rao 1999; Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2003; Zeithaml et al. 2000) - For physical products additional reasons may be operative: Not being able to see, feel or experience a product prior to purchase may inhibit certain consumers to shop online for physical products (Li, Kuo and Russel 1999; Zeithaml et al. 2000). Moreover, consumers have to wait before their product is delivered, attenuating the power of immediate gratification and discouraging impulse shopping (Francis and White 2004; Rohm and Swaminathan 2004; Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2001). Finally, increases in consumers’ perceived expenditures in returning or exchanging products might prevent consumers to shop online (Seiders, Berry and Gresham 2000). --Thijs Broekhuizen 20:32, 4 August 2006 (UTC) (this is a summary based on my dissertation: [1]. The number of references can be shortened to increase the readability.
