abstract
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The rapid growth of electronic commerce is profoundly redefining many basic aspects of business. The customer populations a company serves can be extended, restricted, and/or redefined through electronic commerce. E-commerce enhances the information content in existing company offerings, and enables the development of new information-intensive products and services. It supports shopper movement from physical space to cyberspace, and enables digital delivery of information products and services direct to the customer. It makes pricing more competitive and supports new forms of payments and pricing. E-commerce has also revolutionized promotion mechanisms, and fostered the elimination or adaptation of existing intermediaries as well as the development of intermediaries in entirely new forms. In this paper, the impact of e-commerce is analyzed, based on an extended market mix model with six Ps: People, Product, Place, Price, Promotion, and Partners. Three industry categories are investigated in detail: information service providers, information product providers, and physical product providers. These demonstrate the impact of e-commerce on a wide variety of products and services.