Managerial characteristics of electronic shopping malls

Abstract

The potential of the WWW on the Internet as a commercial medium and market has been widely documented in a variety of media. However, a critical examination of its commercial development has received little attention. There has been little research done on electronic shopping malls. Therefore, we studied electronic shopping malls on the Internet to find the current status. Actually, we searched 91 electronic shopping malls randomly and gathered the data needed for our research frame. In order to investigate the current status ; we observed the current status of electronic shopping malls using the following factors. 1) hierarchical structure of electronic shopping malls 2) level of technology used to design and build the web pages 3) number of stores in each electronic shopping mall 4) scope of service offered by the electronic shopping malls 5) product categories in each electronic shopping mall 6) payment mechanisms 7) customer management 8) malls operator‘s profession. To complement the above study, we collected a limited questionnaire. Based on the statistical analysis, we discussed the observation and survey results of electronic shopping malls. This research is meaningful for future study of managing electronic shopping malls effectively.