Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
Management Science
Impact of e-book technology: Ownership and market asymmetries in digital transformation
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Perceived risks and customer needs of geographical accessibility in electronic commerce
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Traditional and IS-Enabled Customer Acquisition on the Internet
Management Science
Analysis of emerging technology adoption for the digital content market
Information Technology and Management
Ushering Buyers into Electronic Channels: An Empirical Analysis
Information Systems Research
Price Discovery in the U.S. Treasury Market: Automation vs. Intermediation
Management Science
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
A key question for Internet commerce is the nature of competition with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. Although traditional retailers vastly outsell Internet retailers in most product categories, research on Internet retailing has largely neglected this fundamental dimension of competition. Is cross-channel competition significant, and if so, how and where can Internet retailers win this battle? This paper attempts to answer these questions using a unique combination of data sets. We collect data on local market structures for traditional retailers, and then match these data to a data set on consumer demand via two direct channels: Internet and catalog. Our analyses show that Internet retailers face significant competition from brick-and-mortar retailers when selling mainstream products, but are virtually immune from competition when selling niche products. Furthermore, because the Internet channel sells proportionately more niche products than the catalog channel, the competition between the Internet channel and local stores is less intense than the competition between the catalog channel and local stores. The methods we introduce can be used to analyze cross-channel competition in other product categories, and suggest that managers need to take into account the types of products they sell when assessing competitive strategies.