Ebook: E-commerce Relationship Marketing

E-commerce marketing is at the intersection of information systems technology (i.e. supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management), traditional marketing, and the customer interface. In the broader sense E-commerce marketing is comprised of electronic-based activities that facilitate manufactured goods and services by the producer to satisfy the wants and needs of the consumer. To this end, E-commerce marketing is concerned with strategies to persuade customers to purchase online, market research, distribution, customer relationship management, and customer satisfaction. The theme of this special issue of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management is E-commerce relationship marketing research, which consists of software and analytical methods to coordinate online market research, buildWeb sites to facilitate and promote online buying, and to understand customer preferences so as to increase sales and retain economically valuable customers. Several different calls for papers were issued, a general call in IS World, filers at the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science and at America’s Conference on Information Systems. We also sent e-mails to researchers all over the world to elicit papers. We received 22 papers and accepted five. The first paper by Scullin, Fjermestad and Romano discusses the changes to the marketing concepts (customer buying, marketing strategy, call centers) that have been brought about because of electronic customer relationship management. The paper illustrates several examples of how eCRM has altered the marketing concept. The second paper by Chai and Pavlou conducts an empirical study investigating whether cultural dissimilarities really matter in the context of growing a virtual business. The results suggest that culture plays moderating role on E-commerce adoption. Roussinov and Zhao, in their paper build a prototype eCRM to explore and improve communication effectiveness and efficiency in a university environment. The results suggest that a text clustering technique can aid in analyzing customer messages, thus providing a valuable source of customer information. Webb and Webb present a conceptual model and an instrument to measure Web site quality. A factor analysis of the data suggests that there are three key quality factors that customers are concerned about (navigation, relevant representation, and accuracy). These factors are further discussed in the paper. The last paper by White and Daniel was awarded the “best overall paper” at the Business Information Technology (BIT) Conference held at Manchester Metropolitan University in November 2002. This paper explores the e-marketplace dyadic buyer-supplier relationships in the health sector. The results suggest that the adoption of an e-marketplace reduces the number of suppliers used, but more importantly, expands the relationship between and blurs the boundaries of the parties. Jerry Fjermestad, PhD Associate Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology Nicholas C. Romano Jr, PhD Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University Previously published in: Enterprise Information Management, Volume 17, Number 6, 2004