Editorial

Citation

Broadbridge, A. (2006), "Editorial", International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Vol. 34 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrdm.2006.08934gaa.001

Editorial

Issue 7 of this volume of IJRDM continues the theme of Electronic Commerce in the Retail Sector and complements issue 4/5 guest edited by Dr Neil Doherty and Dr Fiona Ellis-Chadwick.

Aileen Kennedy and Joseph Couglan’s paper looks at online shopping portals and their benefits, and potential drawbacks, for traditional retailers. They argue that conventional stationary bricks and mortar retailers are under threat financially from losing business to internet shopping. One solution is to converge the business models of internet and bricks and mortar retailers into one of multi-channel retailing involving a hybrid strategy of a bricks and clicks approach. The authors adopt a case study approach using the portal “Buy4Now” to investigate the experiences of stationary retailers’ experiences in Ireland. They describe the partnering process and logistics model before considering the managerial implications for retailers. Various advantages of such a portal are outlined including the increased prosperity for consumers to visit and make unplanned purchases from retailers they had not originally intended to purchase from. It also provides those retailers partnering the Buy4Now portal an opportunity to “jump the learning curve” in the online environment. Those retailers associated with Buy4Now also benefit from a customised web site management service and marketing expertise. They do point out that the retailers could extend their traditional product range for offer online as it tends to be limited to date. Possible drawbacks include the interdependence of partners and the strength of the anchor tenant as well as the addition and/or turnover of partners. Other drawbacks are the restriction of organisational learning and development of internal expertise, as well as the delivery capabilities and coverage to certain geographic areas.

In their article Muriel Wilson-Jeanselme and Jonathan Reynolds, utilising both qualitative and quantitative methods attempt to understand shoppers expectations of online grocery shopping. They were particularly interested in ascertaining what might persuade online grocer consumers to switch to another provider. This interest arose from the debate that many grocery products are not differentiated and so it might be logical to conclude that price will drive the sales. Alternatively, if non price factors comprise part of the decision making process, competitive advantage might be gained for a retailer focusing on these specific issues. Their advantage of findings is confined to comparing three retailers: Tesco, Sainsbury and Ocada (Waitrose). They examine the sensitivity of shoppers of these three companies to different attributes concerned with online shopping. In an effort to understand the strategies required to acquire customers they also compare the preferences of online shoppers to those who had never used the internet to buy groceries online, where they found ordering time and quality to be important determinants to acquire customers. However, they conclude that the weighting of these factors is different between the online and offline shoppers as well as amongst online shoppers from different retailers.

Graham Winch and Philip Joyce explore the dynamics of building, and losing, consumer trust in business to consumer ebusiness. They offer a four element model of how different contributing factors drive trust to be gained or lost. They argue that a consumer’s trust is derived from their envisaged expected, extrapolated and hypothesised problems, all of which are two way flows. From this model they suggest a cycle of management actions a company must consider if potential customers progressing to purchases are unsatisfactory, and how they can reduce actual risks in the company and its process in the e-transactions.

Finally, the paper by Thomas Foscht, Bernhard Swoboda and Dirk Morscett examines, through the case of Blue Tomato and the Snowboard Industry, electronic commerce-based internationalisation. They begin their paper with a theoretical overview of the forces of internationalisation, focusing on two views in particular: the incremental and revolutionary perspectives. They then provide an overview of “Blue Tomato” the medium sized Austrian snowboarding company that derives 90 per cent of its sales from the internet. They trace the development of the company’s international market-orientated processes and structures and point to their strategy of which countries should be their main focus and which markets are to be handled occasional or not at all. They outline some of the obstacles the company has had to consider in the process of internationalisation (such as pricing). They outline how the structure and culture of the company has changed since it began, which is inevitable as a small informal company grows and expands. The company has always been customer focused and continually investigates customer opinions. The authors discuss how this company has achieved an international presence via electronic commerce, thus avoiding some of the capital investments that other forms of internationalisation might suffer. They also demonstrate how internationalisation is achieved with interplay of revolutionary ad evolutionary steps.

Adelina BroadbridgeUniversity of Stirling