Doc..
Thanks for the tip about today's article. I hadn't made it to the
b-page yet.
I'm reprinting a couple salients excerpts from that article to share..
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From: Books Did It for Amazon, but What's Next?
By SANA SIWOLOP
August 23, 1998 the New York Times
"...So the old question of whether Internet retailing can work is giving way to a new question: In which retail categories will the next Amazons emerge?
Forecasters say the stakes are high. Forrester Research, a market research firm in Cambridge, Mass., expects the online retail market to mushroom from $4.8 billion in sales in 1998 to more than $17 billion in 2001.
But Forrester expects 86 percent of that trade to be in just five categories, all of them already established on line: Computers, software, entertainment, books and travel.
"Those industries that are most susceptible to online retailing are already obvious," explained David Alschuler, an electronic-commerce analyst at Aberdeen Group, a consulting firm in Boston. The best candidates are those where consumers do a lot of research before buying and want information that traditional sales channels have a difficult time supplying, he said....
...The demographics certainly seem right. Consumer electronics shoppers tend to be men with relatively high incomes -- among the people most likely to use the Internet...
....Discount buying clubs are another area that analysts say can do well on the Internet. The leader so far is Net Market, a Cendant subsidiary. But a competitor, Value America, has attracted attention lately with heavy advertising....." |
