Finding e-commerce strategies for businesses

Abstract

E-commerce plays an increasingly important role in providing companies with the requized competitiveness, thus making it critical to analyze and evaluate the key aspects to have in mind when designing an e-commerce strategy. Today, companies face the challenge of deciding the levei of investment and commitment dedicated to the Internet channel and its degree of sophistication as well as its scope and functionalities. This study addresses issues such as how deep should an organization's Internet strategy go, and which factors determine the adequate levei of resources to commit to the Internet presence. It examines the relationship between the main drivers for a successful e-commerce strategy and the ecommerce implementation stages that should be adopted. In order to assess those relationships, a research framework was developed, based on Varadarajan and Yadav [2002] work. These authors considered four main driver categories that will influence a company's Internet positioning: product characteristics, buyer and buying environrnent characteristics, firm characteristics, skills and resources, and industry structure. Also, a web based survey was deployed to collect the opinions of scholars and marketing and information systems professionals from the largest corporations operating in Portugal. The empirical testing provided strong support for the proposed theoretical framework. Study results suggest that characteristics of product, industry, buyer and buying environment, and finn-specific slcills and resources, are relevant for the e-commerce strategy definition, and the factors that compose each of those drivers have non-homogeneous importance for the ecommerce strategy definition. Findings also suggest that some of the drivers' values inhibit the selection of a given e-commerce implementation stage, while others actually promote the stage selection.