MA in Marketing with e-Commerce University of Portsmouth The units passed are listed below. For the dissertation (of 20,000 words) I designed and administered a research project investigating the channel architecture of Internet retailers. The results produced good evidence of the channel-switching shopping behaviour of today's consumers, and established the advantages of multi-channel retailers over their pure-play counterparts.
Marketing Principles
Dissertation: Pure-play e-tailers and multi-channel retailers. Online retail has grown rapidly since its infancy in the mid 1990s, growth which still continues today. Many “dotcoms” started up in the late 90s backed by Venture Capital, but few of them had any genuine competitive advantage or prospect of ever making a profit. The bubble burst, and so they fell. The boom and bust did not stop the growth in B2C e-commerce, and the old traditional companies who had taken their existing brands into online retail were doing well. Apart from a few well known pure-play e-tailers, B2C e-commerce is dominated by the old economy companies who have embraced e-commerce with multi-channel business models. Much research shows that multi-channel strategy has compelling advantages over the single-channel pure-plays. Apart from the issue of having a trusted brand, consumers have adopted channel switching shopping behaviour, and it has been established that the multi-channel shoppers spend more than their single-channel counterparts. This research aimed to find out what pure-play e-tailers were doing about complementing their online stores with other offline sales channels. A questionnaire was sent to 150 online traders, 49 replies were analyzed and 15 of these underwent some further questioning. Within the limitations of this study, it was found that few pure-plays are active in changing their channel strategy. What emerged instead was a breed of start-up e-tailer, with complementary channels already in place.
Graham
Godfrey, Southsea, Hampshire, UK |
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