E-Commerce - online Merchant Strategies

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“Virtual merchants are single-channel e-commerce firms that generate almost all their revenue from online sales. Virtual merchants face extraordinary strategic challenges.” (Laudon, Traver) Besides Amazon, a great example of a virtual merchant is Eastbay, which is an online athletic shoe, clothing, and accessory store that utilizes direct mail to distribute its products. Some aspects that make Eastbay a virtual merchant are they have no physical store locations, other than their headquarters, and they sell their products through the use of their website and their monthly catalog that they send out to their subscribers.

While a virtual merchant focuses on being online, they also focus on providing their consumers with speed and efficiency when it comes to providing their product or service. Eastbay does an exceptional job at this by laying out their website for easy use and access. From the home page, consumers can easily select what product they want based on their gender, age, sport, type of equipment they want, and even what is on sale. Eastbay and other virtual merchants must focus on not only fast service, but fast delivery of their products.

The parent company of Eastbay is Footlocker, and while Footlocker is an Omni-channel Merchant that does not mean Eastbay is as well. Though the brands are tied together, since Eastbay is a brand of its own it is still considered a virtual merchant.

Some risks that may befall virtual merchants, such as Eastbay, are mailing issues, billing issues, and information theft. The mailing issues could be Eastbay sending it to the wrong location, the mailing service ruining the package or delivering it somewhere else, or the purchasers fault by entering the wrong information. The billing issues could be causes by the purchaser making a mistake with selecting what products they want or entering their credit card information wrong or be caused by a technical error by Eastbay’s website. Finally, since Eastbay is online they are at risk of being hacked and could lead to hackers stealing people’s information leading to loss of credit card information and other personal information.

SOURCES

http://revenuesandprofits.com/how-cisco-makes-money/

http://www.orientaltrading.com/h3-about-us.fltr

http://www.bazaarvoice.com/case-studies/oriental-trading-company-case-study.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/best-buy-coupon-mistake_n_2528026.html

Laudon, Ken; Traver, Carol. E-Commerce 2016: Business, Technology, and Society (Page 589). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.