地位英语电子商务英文参考文献

2021年1月20日发(作者：荆棘鸟英文)
The Development of E-commerce
A perfect market
May 13th 2004

From The Economist print edition

E-commerce is coming of age, says Paul Markillie, but not in the way predicted in the bubble
years

When
the
technology
bubble
burst
in
2000,
the
crazy
valuations
for
online
companies
vanished
with
it,
and
many
businesses
folded.
The
survivors
plugged
on
as
best
they
could,
encouraged by the growing number of internet users. Now valuations are rising again and some of
the
dotcoms
are
making
real
profits,
but
the
business
world
has
become
much
more
cautious
about the internet’s potential. The funny thing is that the wild predictions made at the height of the
boom
—
namely, that vast chunks of the world economy would move into cyberspace
—
are, in one
way or another, coming true.
The
raw
numbers
tell
only
part
of
the
story.
According
to
America’s
Department
of
Commerce, online retail sales in the world’s biggest market last year rose by 26%, to $$55 billion.
That sounds a lot of money, but it amounts to only 1.6% of total retail sales. The vast majority of
people still buy most things in the good old “bricks
-and-
mortar” world.

But the commerce department’s figures deal with only part of the retail industry. For instance,
they
exclude
online
travel
services,
one
of
the
most
successful
and
fastest-growing
sectors
of
e-commerce.
InterActiveCorp (IAC), the owner of
and ,
alone sold
$$10
billion-worth of travel last year
—
and it has plenty of competition, not least from airlines, hotels
and car-rental companies, all of which increasingly sell online.
Nor do the figures take in things like financial services, ticket-sales agencies, pornography (a
$$2 billion business in America last year, according to Adult Video News, a trade magazine), online
dating and a host of other activities, from tracing ancestors to gambling (worth perhaps $$6 billion
worldwide). They also leave out purchases in grey markets, such as the online pharmacies that are
thought to be responsible for a good proportion of the $$700m that Americans spent last year on
buying cut-price prescription drugs from across the border in Canada.
And there is more. The commerce department’s figures include the fees earned by internet
auction sites, but not the value of goods that are sold: an astonishing $$24 billion- worth of trade
was done last year on eBay, the biggest online auctioneer. Nor, by definition, do they include the
billions of dollars-worth of goods bought and sold by businesses connecting to each other over the
internet. Some of these B2B services are proprietary; for example, Wal- Mart tells its suppliers that
they must use its own system if they want to be part of its annual turnover of $$250 billion.
So e-commerce is already very big, and it is going to get much bigger. But the actual value of
transactions currently concluded online is dwarfed by the extraordinary influence the internet is
exerting over purchases carried out in the offline world. That influence is becoming an integral
part of e-commerce.
To start with, the internet is profoundly changing consumer behaviour. One in five customers
walking
into
a
Sears
department
store
in
America
to
buy
an
electrical
appliance
will
have
researched their purchase online
—
and most will know down to a dime what they intend to pay.
More surprisingly, three out of four Americans start shopping for new cars online, even though
most end up buying them from traditional dealers. The difference is that these customers come to
the showroom armed with information about the car and the best available deals. Sometimes they
even have computer print-
outs identifying the particular vehicle from the dealer’s stock that they
want to buy.
Half
of
the
60m
consumers
in
Europe
who
have
an
internet
connection
bought
products
offline
after
having
investigated
prices
and
details
online,
according
to
a
study
by
Forrester,
a
research consultancy (see chart 1). Different countries have different habits. In Italy and Spain, for
instance, people are twice as likely to buy offline as online after researching on the internet. But in
Britain
and
Germany,
the
two
most
developed
internet
markets,
the
numbers
are
evenly
split.
Forrester says that people begin to shop online for simple, predictable products, such as DVDs,
and
then
graduate
to
more
complex
items.
Used-car
sales
are
now
one
of
the
biggest
online
growth areas in America.
People seem to enjoy shopping on the internet, if high customer- satisfaction scores are any
guide. Websites are doing ever more and cleverer things to serve and entertain their customers,
and seem set to take a muc
h bigger share of people’s overall spending in the future.

This has enormous implications for business. A company that neglects
its
website
may
be
committing
commercial
suicide.
A
website
is
increasingly
becoming
the
gateway to
a
compa
ny’s brand, products
and services—
even if the firm
does not
sell online. A
useless website suggests a useless company, and a rival is only a mouse-click away. But even the
coolest website will be lost in cyberspace if people cannot find it, so companies have to ensure
that they appear high up in internet search results.