E-commerce Failure

E-Commerce

Ecommerce, e-commerce or known as electronic commerce is the conduct of financial transactions by electronic means. It also consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as internet and other computer networks. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.


Example of E-commerce Failure

IBM’s World Avenue Mall is one of the failures on e-commerce. This online mall lasted less than a year as it launched in August 1996 and close down in July 1997 which means it does not even lasted than a year. This mall uses IBM names to rent out to other companies to sell their products but yet lack of understanding of customer and online user leads to a shutting down of the mall and spoilt IBM’s name.

Causes

The failures of IBM were probably launched too early, before online usage become sufficiently popular to justify IBM’s investment in that project. Merchantman also claim that IBM did not adequate promote the project. IBM’s name alone was not very popular and was not sufficient to bring enough customer traffic to the site to make to a success.

Moving on, internet usage was still not popular in use among people as IBM was launched and is expensive too. People prefer to buy directly from traditional as they can view the actual product rather than purchasing online that only can depends on the picture available, some even comment that the price of purchasing online was much more expensive than purchasing directly from retail store. Security at that time is another issue concern by the users as they worried about their own privacy is being acknowledged by other people.