Internet shopping

Internet shopping, commonly referred to as "e-tail" (Foley, 2001) is the process of buying and selling merchandise over the Internet. "eBusiness" is rapidly replacing traditional business for virtually any type of retail transaction. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com was a visionary that was able to see the benefit of efficiently leveraging the retail sale of books by means of the Internet. While others such as Pierre Omidyar (eBay) also had the vision, it was Bezos that had the most complete vision and the ability to bring the appropriate resources to bear to capitalize on the opportunity. As such, his vision has become the point of reference for any organization that is looking to sell product in the online environment (Ramo, 1999, 1).

Bezos has taken his original model and expanded it beyond its original niche (books) and today the company sells everything from power tools to CDs and is continually looking for new areas in which to expand (Ramo, 1999, 2). The new global nature of the marketplace is such that those individuals empowered with the greatest amount of information will win (Ramo, 1999, 2).

In the past, it was the seller who held the advantage with respect to "information." Today, the scales are rapidly tipping in favor of the consumer, largely because of the information empowerment provided by the Internet.

While originally created by the Defense Department, until 1994, the Internet (then it was still called the "World-Wide-Web")

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of the Internet. Borders Group, Inc. was late to taking advantage of the on-line bookselling marketplace. The real initial competition to the book e-tailing environment created by Amazon.com was that provided by Barnes & Noble. By 1996, Amazon.com had clearly established a jump on the marketplace and it was up to others to catch up. The Barnes & Noble Web site (barnesandnoble.com) went live in 1997 prior to Amazon's initial public offering (IPO). Initially Wall Street looked askance at Amazon, believing instead that once Barnes & Noble's Web site gained momentum, in concert with the power of their huge nationwide retailing structure, there would be little hope for survival. On-line competition from Barnes & Noble did nothing to stall Amazon sales (Quittner, 2003, 6). Borders, in comparison, never did embrace the Internet environment for the simple reason that it did not focus on the same basic business rules of strong profits and reasonable operating costs that had successfully worked so well in the past. The Borders stock price was "punished" for this conservative attitude (Hanrahan, 2003, R4). Ultimately Borders began to sell via the Internet in 1998, three (3) long years after Amazon.com had gotten into this market.

Category: Business - I