Shedding a scientific light on e-commerce management

e-Commerce (EC) sales have been increasing consistently for decades all over the world. Although EC has great advantages over traditional commerce, succeeding in EC business is not an easy task.

So far EC owners have been making their decisions based on unscientific approaches, such as an educated guess, experience, superficial numbers, and a hunch.

Shigeru Hayashi and Kunihiko Higa at Tokyo Institute of Technology have proposed a model called the Staged Growth (SG) model of EC. The model is intended to provide EC owners with a scientific means to view their own EC sites and customers.

The SG model was validated with field data from an EC site. The result indicated that approximately 80% of purchasing behavior at the site could be explained with both trust and value factors. The practical use of the model was also verified by interviewing seven managers of EC sites.

With the SG model, practitioners will be able to examine the effect of individual marketing efforts and researchers will be able to analyze the transitional behavior of customers and the mutual interplay between trust and value factors.

Figure. Staged growth model of e-Commerce

Reference

Authors:	Shigeru Hayashi and Kunihiko Higa.
Title of original paper:	Analysis of Differentiating Factors among Trust and Value Stages in e-Commerce Growth Process.
Journal:	Journal of Japan Industrial Management Association 60, 191-196 (2009)
CiNii :	PDF available at CiNii

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