Primo Award '99
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DMLR*Newsletter - Since 1997
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| No.20 issue - Apr. 1999
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Figures & tips of the month
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Glossary: E-commerce
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Portals
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A case history: Gap Online
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A shopping guide
Articles
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Figures & tips of the month.
- 75% of all Internet transactions are Business-to-Business (remaining 25% is Business-to-Consumer).
- 2 are the main objectives of adopting E-commerce strategy: reducing of transactional costs and improving of productivity on the front-office (marketing, sales).
- 0.5% is the share of the world wide trade transacted by E-commerce solutions -Internet, Extranet, Intranet.
- 22 euro is today's amount of sales free from tax and duty on the international trade from Italy.
- 2,3 million are the potential customers of the Internet commerce in Italy (= Internet users);
- 25 million are the potential customers of the Mobile commerce in Italy (= cell phone users).
- 5 the possible outlooks of approaching the Internet marketing by an enterprise: brand, promotion, sales, order & payment, relationship.
(Source: E-commercing '99 convention at Milan, March).
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Glossary: E-commerce.
What is electronic commerce? The term electronic commerce refers generally to commercial transactions, involving both organisations and individuals, that are based upon the processing and transmisssion of digitized data, including text, sound and visual images and that are carried out over open networks (like the Internet) or closed networks (like AOL or Minitel) that have gateway onto an open network.
See details at: OECD, www.oecd.org.
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Portals.
Buzz word of the 1998, the 'portals' are arriving to Italy. What is a portal? An evolution of the search engine, a multi-faceted site surfers might actually pick as homepage. The differences are obvious. Search engines are a useful, indeed necessary, aspect of life on the net, whereas they don't provide all the services and information users need every day. Moreover, many of the major search engines are available on the portals. In Italy you can consider as portals the former national wide ISPs (tin.it, iol.it) or some of international portals now available into Italian (lycos.it, yahoo.it). To choose the right portal as your daily net homepage, try to allocate the candidates a score following the websites' evaluation method described on DMLR*News no.18.
(Contains an excerpt from eMarketer.com).
- A case history: Gap Online.
Gap is a jeans and casual wearing company, owner of three products lines. Each of them combined with a website -gap (basic), gapkids, babygap- advertised as stores "always open". In keeping with its young and innovative image, Gap has developed the official websites to sell and speak directly to current and potential shoppers. For instance, Gap is regularly using a mailing list for updating the registered visitors about new products and promotions via email. The system allows a product-oriented information, in order to capture the seasonal demanding and/or to highlight a single product line ("from zip-front leather jackets to suede skirts"). Besides Gap is providing details on promotion available on both virtual and physical stores. Shoppers may win a Panasonic palm portable DVD: "So drop by www.gap.com, do some shopping, and you just might win". More recently, Gap launched a commercial campaign (New Gap Khakis TV) premiering it both online, as private screening for registered consumers, and during the 71st annual Academy Awards show on March 21st. The spot could be viewed downloading RealPlayer software from the website. The ads had been then showing exclusively at Gap-Online for the following days, until they did return to television on April 1st.
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A shopping guide.
What about if the Internet had reinvented the wheel? After all the consumer behavior is already well known by traditional marketing studies. The grade of involvement on the buying process and the level of products' differentiation have been defining the four rules of the shopper's behavior.
A) High involvement / high differentiation cause a complex buyer's behavior, i.e. the product is as meaningful for the consumer as a personal, unique thing.
B) Low involvement / high differentiation allow a choice among various branded products, i.e. the evaluating process is led by a continuous searching for new alternatives.
C) Low involvement / low differentiation are referring to regular items to buy, i.e. the shoppers are not linked to a specific brand, but to the retailers' sales promotion.
D) High involvement / low differentiation determine a quick buying among a few products, i.e. the self-identification of the shopper with the desired product rules the selection process.
On the magazine of April (Top*Four) let's window shop over some websites where the action is!
Copyright 1999 - All rights reserved (except where indicated).
Roberto Dondi- marketing consultant.
Member of A.P.C.O. (www.apcoitalia.it).
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