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Table of Content
Product suitability
Certain products/services appear more suitable for online
sales; others remain more suitable for offline sales.
Many successful purely virtual companies deal with digital
products, including information storage, retrieval, and modification, music, movies,
office supplies, education, communication, software, photography, and financial
transactions. Examples of this type of company include: Google, eBay and Paypal.
Virtual marketers can sell some non-digital products and services
successfully. Such products generally have a high value-to-weight ratio, they may
involve embarrassing purchases, they may typically go to people in remote locations,
and they may have shut-ins as their typical purchasers. Items which can fit through
a standard letterbox - such as music CDs, DVDs and books - are particularly suitable
for a virtual marketer, and indeed Amazon.com, one of the few enduring dot-com companies,
has historically concentrated on this field.
Products such as spare parts, both for consumer items like
washing machines and for industrial equipment like centrifugal pumps, also seem
good candidates for selling online. Retailers often need to order spare parts specially,
since they typically do not stock them at consumer outlets -- in such cases, e-commerce
solutions in spares do not compete with retail stores, only with other ordering
systems. A factor for success in this niche can consist of providing customers with
exact, reliable information about which part number their particular version of
a product needs, for example by providing parts lists keyed by serial number.
Purchases of pornography and of other sex-related products
and services fulfill the requirements of both virtuality (or if non-virtual, generally
high-value) and potential embarrassment; unsurprisingly, provision of such services
has become the most profitable segment of e-commerce.
Products unsuitable for e-commerce include products that have
a low value-to-weight ratio, products that have a smell, taste, or touch component,
products that need trial fittings - most notably clothing - and products where colour
integrity appears important. Nonetheless, Tesco.com has had success delivering groceries
in the UK, albeit that many of its goods are of a generic quality, and clothing
sold through the internet is big business in the U.S.
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