凌紫泪2012电子商务毕业论文外文翻译
already the best way to reach some consumers: teenagers and young men spend more time online than watching television. All this means that search is turning into the internet’s next big battleground as Google defends itself against challenges from Yahoo! and Microsoft.
The other way to get noticed online is to offer goods and services through one of the big sites that already get a lot of traffic. Ebay, Yahoo! and Amazon are becoming huge trading platforms for other companies. But to take part, a company’s products have to stand up to intense price competition. People check online prices, compare them with those in their local high street and may well take a peek at what customers in other countries are paying. Even if websites are prevented from shipping their goods abroad, there are plenty of web-based entrepreneurs ready to oblige.
What is going on here is arbitrage between different sales channels, says Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. For instance, someone might use the internet to research digital cameras, but visit a photographic shop for a hands-on demonstration. “I’ll think about it,” they will tell the sales assistant. Back home, they will use a search engine to find the lowest price and buy online. In this way, consumers are “deconstructing the purchasing process”, says Professor Sawhney. They are unbundling product information from the transaction itself.
It is not only price transparency that makes internet consumers so powerful; it is also the way the net makes it easy for them to be fickle. If they do not like a website, they swiftly move on. “The web is the most selfish environment in the world,” says Daniel Rosensweig, chief operating officer of Yahoo! “People want to use the internet whenever they want, how they want and for whatever they want.”
Yahoo! is not alone in defining its strategy as working out what its customers (260m unique users every month) are looking for, and then trying to give it to them. The first thing they want is to become better informed about products and prices. “We operate our business on that belief,” says Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. Amazon became famous for books, but long ago branched out into selling lots of other things too; among its latest ventures are health products, jewellery and gourmet food. Apart from cheap and bulky items such as garden rakes, Mr Bezos thinks he can sell most things. And so do the millions of people who use eBay.
And yet nobody thinks real shops are finished, especially those operating in niche markets. Many bricks-and-mortar bookshops still make a good living, as do flea
