A Challenge for the Marketing Strategy: Products in the Electronic Commerce Environment

The Internet has proved to be a life savior for many businesses in a time where consumers demand at least some sort of online presence from the companies. Both retailers and consumers use the electronic commerce platform as a way of conducting day to day business and completing transactions. Electronic commerce has been a major milestone in the ongoing process of expanding beyond the traditional physical store. Regardless of the time and space dimensions, consumers have been shopping online and their behavior has been the subject of analysis for researchers and marketers. Hence, it might come as a surprise that although the first product classification model has been developed in the 1920s, there is still little standardization among the classification models and the vast number of models the literature provided to the present day makes it challenging for firms to comply with a standard and to align it to their marketing strategy. Therefore this paper aims at showing just how important such a standardized model would be and how it can impact not only customer perception, but also a firm’s competitive advantage. A short overview of the literature research highlights how many models researchers have developed in the last eight decades.