Literature Review- Classifications and Typologies

There has been some work on classifying Internet retail websites.

1.  The earliest attempt to categorize online retailers was done by Hoffman, Novak and Chatterjee (1996) who proposed six categories of Internet sites for e-commerce:

- Online Storefront
- Internet Presence ( Flat Ad, Image and Information)
- Content (Fee-Based, Sponsored, Searchable Database)
- Mall
- Incentive Site
- Search Agent

2. Hoger, Cappel and Myerscough (1998) suggested a typology of business uses of the Internet for electronic commerce that consists of five categories:

- marketplace awareness
- customer support
- sales
- advertising
- electronic information services

Generally, researchers (Spiller and Lohse, 1997/99; Mottner, Thelen and Karande, 2003) drew upon parallels with traditional/offline marketing to derive schemes to classify online retailers.  They developed  attributes used to evaluate the Internet retailing sites based on reviews of literature on traditional retail typography.  Thus there were some assumptions that e-retailing had similar structures to traditional retailing which qualified the use of the attributes in this study.

3. Spiller and Lohse (1997, 1999) presented some analogies between retail stores, paper catalogs and online catalogs.

They adopted Lindquist's (1975) list of retail store attributes- which he derived from 26 other researchers- and offered five categories of online retail attributes:

- merchandise
- service
- promotion
- navigation

- user interface

In their 1997 study, they used an empirical method to classify 137 Internet retail stores by observing 35 Internet retail site attributes/variables derived from these five categories.

Using cluster analysis of these store attributes, they identified five distinct types of online retail stores as follows:

- super stores
- promotional stores
- plain sales catalogues
- one page catalogues
- product listings

They also found that online stores can be differentiated along three dimensions- store size, service offerings and interface quality.

4. Pota and Dushyant (2000) classified online retailers by considering their corporate origin to obtain insights to the strategic and operational advantages that these retail types enjoy. These classifications are:

- pure Internet startups
- traditional store-based retailers
- catalog retailers
- combination store-and-catalog retailers
- wholesale suppliers

5. Like Spiller and Lohse, Mottner, Thelen and Karande (2003) built a typology of Internet retailers by analyzing 152 Internet retailing websites.

They combined these traditional physical retail store attributes with unique e-retail store attributes to identify factors that differentiate online retailers and to classify online retail sites.

Using factor analysis, seven attributes were identified:

- assortment (breadth and depth)
- service
- security
- site features
- price
- ease of use
- product customization

These seven variables were used to cluster the 152 e-retailers, where clusters emerged to form three primary types of e-tailers:

- product focused
- micro-segment focused
- developed intermediaries

References:

1.  Mottner, S., Thelen, S., and Karande, K. (2003).  A Typology of Internet Retailing- An Exploratory Study. Journal of Marketing Channels, 1540-7039, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 3 – 23. 

2. Spiller, P. and Lohse, G. (1997). "A classification of Internet retail stores". International journal of electronic commerce (1086-4415), 2 (2), page 56. Available at: http://www.exs.hu/~bence/ecomm/wharton/classifinternretailstores.pdf

3. Lohse G., and Spiller, P. (1999). Internet Retail Store Design: How the User Interface Influences Traffic and Sales. Journal of Computer Mediated Communications. 5 (2).  Available at: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol5/issue2/lohse.htm 

4. Hoffman, DL, Novak, TP, and Chatterjee, P. (1996). Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges. Journal of Computer Mediated Communications. 1 (3). Available at: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue3/hoffman.htm 

5. Hoger, EA, Cappel JJ, and Myerscough MA, (1998).Navigating the Web with a Typology of Corporate Uses. Business Communication Quarterly, Jun98, Vol. 61 Issue 2, p39-47


6. Pota and Dushyant (2000). Understanding Online Retail: A Classification of Online Retailers. The Journal of Computer Information Systems.