Mark L. Gillenson

Consumer acceptance of virtual stores: a theoretical model and critical success factors for virtual stores

Virtual stores provide great efficiency in the retail value chain, and their existence has tremendously paved the way for the diffusion of electronic commerce. Understanding the determinants of consumer acceptance of virtual stores will provide important theoretical contributions to the area of business-to-consumer (B-to-C) electronic commerce and lead to the development of more effective and meaningful strategies for virtual stores. By expanding the Technology Acceptance Model and the Innovation Diffusion Theory, this study aims to provide an integral theoretical paradigm that can successfully support a wide array of technical, business, and consumer issues involved in online retailing. The results from a Web-based survey of 253 online consumers indicate that the proposed theoretical model is able to explain and predict consumer acceptance of virtual stores substantially well. The resulting theoretical model explains a large portion of the factors that lead to a users behavioral intention to use and actual use of a virtual store. In addition to providing new theoretical grounds for studying the virtual store phenomenon, this article also supplies virtual stores with a number of operative critical success factors to remain competitive in the volatile electronic marketplace.

Mobile commerce: what it is and what it could be

claimed that m-commerce had arrived, and would shortly provide unprecedented commercial functionality to the masses [2, 5]. Cell phone users were expected to be routinely accessing data online [5], and speedy third-generation cellular standards would soon solve associated bandwidth difficulties [2]. It hasn’t quite worked out that way—it sometimes takes the passage of a few years to see how rationality and market economics can skewer technological predictions [4]. Now, with hindsight, we can review what we once thought m-commerce might be, and consider its present and future. M-commerce is not always, strictly speaking, classical e-commerce. The idea of e-commerce is widely understood and there is also a certain agreement on what m-commerce is at a basic level, since the “m” in the name is self-evident. Both modalities are computer-assisted and network-enabled, so what are the differences? While each of the two shares aspects of the other, each also possesses unique characteristics that tend to define its state and functionality.

Employee relationship management: Applying the concept of personalization to U.S. Navy Sailors

Abstract Using customer relationship management (CRM) techniques, companies target market to their customers on an individualized basis. A variation on the CRM theme is employee relationship management (ERM), in which a company uses Web-based personalization techniques to develop a more effective relationship with its employees. This article reports some of the findings for a study sponsored by the U.S. Navy to determine how personalization can be used for a Web portal with the objective of boosting sailor morale and retention. It also discusses ways that CRM personalization techniques can be generalized to fields beyond marketing and employee relations.

The hybrid clicks and bricks business model

With the advent of the Internet, retail business attracted a myriad of new online pure players employing a clicks-only business model. In the early stage of electronic commerce, many of these “e-tailers” achieved stunning growth rates and had massive revenue streams. Online retailers such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, led the way as startups that showed how to utilize the extraordinary Internet capability to become successful in Web-based electronic commerce. Unfortunately, many of these early online companies, including such high-profile firms as etoys.com and garden.com, have folded. In many cases they lacked several critical capabilities required to make profits in the short and long run, such as superior maintenance and customer services, and logistics capabilities required in the real, physical world [12]. Further, lack of brand awareness, lack of consumer trust, and an established customer base proved to be a crucial drawback, pressuring the dot-com startups to invest in massive marketing campaigns to attempt to compete with traditional retailers, now known as bricks and mortar businesses. To further complicate the start-ups’ lives, they began to face the revenge of the bricks and mortar retailers, many of which initially took a wait-and-see approach to Internet retailing but eventually joined in. The built-in advantages of brick-and-mortar retailers, in terms of brand awareness and existing large customer bases, enabled them to take advantage of online shopping when they were ready for it. Traditional retailers, such as Staples, Best Buy, and The Gap, eventually added an online retail capability and established their presence on the Internet. These traditional retailers are said to be employing a “clicks and bricks” hybrid business model that combines the strengths of the digital and the physical elements of business. This hybrid business model, blending Internet and physical activities, is very compelling. A study by Jupiter Communications Inc. reported that in 2005, U.S. online customers will spend more than

Trends in data administration

632 billion in offline purchases. This study asserts that customers will use companies’ web sites for searching for information about products and performing product comparisons, then ultimately go to physical stores to make the actual purchase [2].

Satisfaction with employee relationship management systems: the impact of usefulness on systems quality perceptions

The field of data administration originated as an adjunct to the expanding use of database management systems. With the increasing amount of data that data processing personnel are faced with managing, and the realization that data is an important corporate resource, the concept of data administration has continued to evolve and change. At several points in time over the last few years field surveys have been conducted to determine the state of practice of the data administration function. Using data derived from those surveys (and emphasizing the two which were conducted by this author) as well as empirical evidence, this article traces the development of the concept of data administration, concentrating on the period from 1981 to 1985.

Technology Solutions for Improving Accuracy and Availability of Healthcare Records

The ability to effectively manage external customer satisfaction through IT-based Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) is well documented in the literature. The concept of applying such technologies in Business to Employee relationships to manage the firms relationships with its employees is not. By extending the CRM paradigm to consider the service of internal customers, we characterize the emergent concept of Employee Relationship Management systems (ERM) for investigation. We find that employee satisfaction with ERM systems designed to provide access to benefits and other important employee services is largely a function of systems quality perceptions, as moderated by employee perceptions of system usefulness. Specifically, we believe our results suggest that high-quality systems implementations will not produce high degrees of employee satisfaction with ERM systems unless such systems are also found by the employee to be highly useful for their intended purpose. This highlights the critical role of accurate assessments of user requirements matched to specific needs from human resources-based systems support in the analysis phase of system design.

Segmenting online customers to manage business resources: a study of the impacts of sales channel strategies on consumer preferences

ABSTRACT Providers need access to the data in patient healthcare records to make decisions that provide the type of high-quality services, which lead to successful medical treatments. This article summarizes the data accuracy and data availability problems that exist in managing healthcare records, and then describes various technology solutions that could be designed to address specific data problems.

The state of practice of data administration—1981

This study extends our current knowledge in the area of online consumer behavior by examining how a businesss sales channel strategy could influence consumers sales channel preferences. It makes a new argument that business strategies could play an important role in consumer sales channel preference development. When a business offers multiple sales channels (a hybrid model), its customers can compare sales channels either within or outside of the same corporate business. Such freedom is, however, diminished when a business employs the Internet as the only transaction medium (pure Internet store). A matrix was developed to demonstrate how business strategies could interplay in the consumer preference formation process and later was used to segment our respondents into three different groups. They were segmented according to the sales channel strategies of their selected Internet store and the brick-and-mortar store that they used to make a comparison. MANOVA and structural equation modeling tests were performed on 435 survey respondents. Four preferential factors, including transaction cost, product, risk, and social experience, were used as examples and tested across three groups of respondents. Results revealed that online users employ different sets of preferential factors when comparing different sets of sales channels. Such results were thereafter used to draw a new set of online strategies that could be used to allocate business resources more effectively.

The Contribution of IT Governance Solutions to the Implementation of Data Warehouse Practice

Data administration, the management of data in the data processing environment, is an increasingly important but understudied subject. During the first quarter of 1981, the IBM Systems Research Institute conducted a survey among IBMs database account systems engineers in the United States in order to determine the state of practice of data administration and the usage of data dictionaries in the data processing environment today. The survey found that the practice is young but firmly established and growing strongly. This article summarizes the findings of that survey and provides interpretations. It also discusses several previous surveys and some classic ideas in the field.