Cybermarketing, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9

E-commerce – selling online

Many websites were first set up to provide corporate information and to promote products. Sales were expected to take place in shops, on the telephone, by mail order. The growth in e-commerce indicates that this has changed. The web is seen, more and more, as primarily a direct selling medium, and online selling has grown dramatically. A KPMG study of European companies using the Internet for selling in 1999 showed that the channel accounted for 2 per cent of their total sales. This was forecast to grow to 12 per cent in three years. By 2005, Internet sales were forecast to be 16 per cent of total sales of all companies in Europe – an extraordinary shift in the location of the sales transaction. It is vital, ...