Analysis of Electronic Commerce Adopter Categories in Retailing: The Case of Automobile Dealerships

Abstract

On the basis of a qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews of 7 automobile dealerships in Oulu, Finland, we uncovered 4 themes: strategic understanding of electronic commerce (eCommerce), technological understanding of eCommerce, maturity of the Web site supporting eCommerce, and eCommerce developmental strategy. These themes allowed us to make sense in a succinct way of the similarities and differences among these automobile dealerships. Ranking the 7 dealerships on these 4 themes (dimensions) yielded consistent patterns and led us to identify adopter categories of eCommerce. We suggest 3 major adopter categories: procrastinators, followers, and visionaries. Followers are further divided into opportunists, waverers, and striders. Analysis of the histories of Web sites also showed that the existence of a Web site as such and its operational use are not sufficient to trigger effective learning about eCommerce. We suggest that learning at the levels of strategic understanding and technological understanding of eCommerce is a joint outcome of eCommerce developmental strategy and the Web site maturity rather than either of them separately. The interviews also showed that the dealers with higher strategic and technological understanding had a more active eCommerce developmental strategy and more mature Web sites. This finding led us to conjecture that the developmental strategy and the Web site maturity are influenced by both strategic understanding and technological understanding.

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