Analysis of Electronic Commerce Adopter Categories in Retailing: The Case of Automobile Dealerships

Abstract

Based on a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews of seven automobile dealerships in the City of Oulu, Finland, we uncovered four themes -strategic understanding of electronic commerce, technological understanding of electronic commerce, maturity of the website supporting electronic commerce, and electronic commerce developmental strategy -which allowed to make sense in a succinct way of the similarities and differences among seven automobile dealerships. Locating the seven dealerships on these four themes (dimensions) yielded quite consistent patterns, and led us to identify adopter categories of electronic commerce. We suggest three major adopter categories: " procrastinators," " followers," and " visionaries." " Followers" are divided further into " opportunists," " waverers," and " striders." The analysis of the histories of websites also showed that the existence of a website as such and its operational use are not sufficient to trigger effective learning about electronic commerce. We suggest that the learning at the levels of strategic and technological understanding of electronic commerce are joint outcomes of electronic commerce developmental strategy and the website maturity rather than either of them separately. The interviews also showed that the dealers with higher strategic and technological understanding tended to have a more active electronic commerce developmental strategy and more mature websites. This led us to conjecture that the developmental strategy and the website maturity are influenced by both strategic and technological understanding.

Critical Themes in Electronic Commerce Research: A Meta-Analysis

“…Surprisingly, accounting services/ processes and healthcare services are also the subjects of multiple studies (Payton, 2003). Finally, the grocery trade, publishing and travel industries are consistently represented in electronic commerce studies (Palmer and Lindemann, 2003;Ellis, 2003), as are wine (Gebauer and Ginsburg, 2003), real estate (Crowston and Wigand, 1999), logisitics (Brown and Venkatesh, 2003) and automobiles (Iivari and Janson, 2003).…”

The evaluation of e‐commerce impact on business efficiency

“…).Lower asymmetry of information stimulates competition, and companies are forced to look for new competition advantages because on the market where all participants have the needed information the significance of information becomes lower.Information also is the basic factor in supply chain. The summary of Brookes and Wahhaj (2000), Coppel (2000), Biro and Messnarz (2000), Deise et al (2000), Fensel and Bussler (2002), van Slyke and Belanger (2003) researches allows stating that the company, which relocates supply chain management in electronic environment, can generate the cost economy in four positions, which are connected to the growing efficiency of information reception and transition:To lower the cost of materials ordering process.To lower the average material inventories that allow reducing average manufacturing cost.Faster and cheaper identify suppliers who can or are ready to supply cheaper materials or can shorten the number of intermediaries.To stimulate the competition between suppliers that would generate the positive direct impact – lower prices of materials in case of competitor price war, and indirect impact – lower prices of materials in case of higher efficiency of supplier performance.The economy of materials ordering process is firstly evaluated as a positive factor in e‐commerce adoption (Molla and Licker, 2001; Cavalieri et al , 2003; Iivari and Janson, 2003). The cost of ordering process consists of order submission documentation, correspondence, document storage and labour expenditures.…”

An investigation on institutionalization of websites of firms

“…As a result, most firms have created and operated websites aligned with their business needs such as communicating with customers, promoting products, and processing orders. The ubiquity of websites as a viable conduit of alternative transactions in business has led researchers to investigate factors that influence firms' adoption of e-commerce (e.g., Dos Santos and Peffers, 1998;Iivari and Janson, 2003;MacKay, Parent, and Gemino, 2004;Chatterjee, Grewal, Sambamurthy, 2002;Grandon and Pearson, 2004).…”