t can engender a remarkable increase in profits:
Because if all people have the potential to be connected at all times in all settings through the Internet and wireless phones, then you want your product or service always available to themà Product or service ubiquity is a race in which being first means everything. The company that reaches far beyond its nearest competitor in terms of anywhere and anytime access will gain virtually unshakable market share.
Wal-Mart is as ubiquitous as it can be. Brick-and-mortar stores are everywhere in the United States, plus in many countries around the world. And now with its advent into ebusiness, Wal-Mart is everywhere the customer is, whenever the customer is online. As one writer insightfully states, ôYour success depends on being there whenever they want you to beö (Sviokla, 2001).
One of the immediate advantages of ebusiness for Wal-Mart is an increase in its ability to target its customers. Since Wal-Mart does not have customer discount cards or any other type of method for tracking its customers and their purchases, it had no way of knowing who its customers were before expanding to the Internet. It had no profile of each customer, ôonly aggregate statistics to predict what type of customer will visit and whereö (Sviokla, 2001). With Internet shopping, however, Wal-Mart gets vital data about the customers who make purchases: their name, address, and credit card number. This enables the company to begin associating customer product preferences with names, thus providing a way to market items customers will be interested in directly to them; the direct targeting not only increases sales but costs less than marketing to everyone and hoping that some of them will be interested.
Furthermore, customers that engage in multi-channel buyingùi.e., buying by phone, Internet, or catalogs in addition to buying in-storeùspend four times more than single-channel customers, a b...