Can innovative partnerships increase store traffic and improve the retail revenue stream?
A four-year study of Japanese business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce initiatives reveals the innovative ways Japanese corporations exploit traditional aspects of Japanese business and consumer retailing — specifically, the consumer’s preference for paying with cash and the willingness of corporations to form cooperative alliances (the keiretsu model) — to further develop the potential of B2C e-commerce.
The focal point of these particular research findings? Japan’s convenience stores, where services, such as bill paying and the sale of ready-to-eat fast food, have played a far greater role in the overall business than in the United States.
“The sophisticated information technology required to support these traditional offerings means that the Japanese convenience store has entered the e-commerce era with some previous experience in practically every aspect of e-tailing — from deploying IT to analyzing customer needs,” says William V. Rapp, professor of international trade and business at the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Management in Newark.
He and Mazhar ul Islam, research and teaching associate at the International University of Germany’s School of Business Administration in Bruchsal, are co-authors of Putting E-Commerce To Work: The Japanese Convenience Store Case, a May 2003 working paper from the Columbia University Center on Japanese Economy and Business.