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

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.