E-Retailing: New Opportunities in Internet Commerce

Internet commerce has brought forward a new spectrum of business practice. It radically changes the way we do business. These changes have been fairly impulsive and inevitable. Limitations caused by traditional commercial practices, such as barriers to reach the whole target market due to geographical distance,and high transaction costs due to engagement costs for attorney, agent and broker involvement, are no longer major issues as businesses become adept at identifying mechanisms to create and deliver value. In view of this new trend, a critical question to be answered is, what is the implication of Internet commerce on the conventional way of conducting business? Has Internet commerce changed the retailing market by eliminating the intermediaries out of the transaction chain? Or, has it defined new roles for the retail industries and intermediaries? This chapter attempts to reveal the impact of Internet commerce to discover new opportunities and identify challenges, in particular, for the intermediaries. It presents a physical and virtual model of business environment and highlights the business areas which would have been affected the most by the introduction of on-line services. The discussion in this chapter is aimed to enable the reader to evaluate the trends, the gains and the losses resulting from Internet commerce in today’s competitive business environment.