E-Commerce and V-Business

5

Measuring theeffectiveness ofe-commerce Web sites

Petra Schubert and Dorian Selz

Introduction

The Internet could be, at least from a technological point of view, the closest approximation of a perfect market and a frictionless economy. Ubiquitous information allows buyers to compare the offerings of vendors worldwide. One prediction of customer behaviour claims that all marketing activity can be reduced to one factor, namely price. For example, Kuttner, writing in Business Week:

But in Net commerce, the whole premise is that consumers will be, and should be, fickle. So the comparison shopper can use Amazon's delightful book reviews and other nifty features and then disloyally buy the product from Barnes and Noble if the price is lower (Kuttner, ...