Personalization Tools
Tools such as the software that creates personalized interfaces between e-businesses and customers hold tremendous promise for value exchange and contextual commerce. To be sure, the value of personalization has yet to be fully demonstrated in practice. (Fewer than 15 percent of visitors to Yahoo! have chosen to set up a "My Yahoo!" page for themselves.) Personalization tools also present risks, as well as real operational challenges, such as managing privacy, intrusiveness, and opportunity costs. For that reason, many practitioners still question the short-term return on investments in personalization tools.
Collaborative Tools
They facilitate word of mouth, or what might be called "branded person-to-person communications"—for instance, the ratings that buyers offer sellers on eBay, the Lands’ End "shop with a friend" feature, Raging Bull’s discussion boards, and Pert’s viral marketing (which encourages consumers to e-mail their friends instructions for obtaining free Pert Plus samples). Collaborative tools such as consumer ratings, though essential for content- and community-oriented digital brands, are underutilized.
Purchase-process Streamlining Tools
They eliminate such physical-world constraints as the need to walk into a store to purchase a product. Amazon’s one-click ordering system, for example, eases transactions by sparing repeat customers the inconvenience of inputting transaction data. Peapod’s shopping lists save consumers time by recording the products they purchased previously. The fact that most e-shoppers drop out of the buying process during the last clicks suggests that improvements along these lines might be very worthwhile.
Self-service Tools
They allow customers to obtain answers and results without the delays and inconsistencies that more often than not characterize human efforts to provide assistance. Such tools include software for tracking orders, preparing statements, and changing
addresses on-line. Although incumbents often have difficulty integrating these Web-based tools with legacy systems, the tools are indispensable for banks, retailers, and other e-businesses that handle large volumes of transactions.
Do-it-yourself product design tools
They allow consumers to customize products and services, either with the help of configuration options or from scratch. Dell Computer, for example, lets customers design their own systems on-line by choosing from a range of options; customers of Music.com and Listen.com can download the music of various artists onto a single compact disc. But the need to create manufacture-to-order systems to capture the potential of these tools may make them uneconomical in industries that, unlike software and music, are not based on information.
Dynamic-pricing tools
They overthrow the tyranny of the fixed retail price, allowing prices to fit the particular circumstances of individual transactions. Such tools, which come in many forms, include eBay’s and uBid’s auctions and Priceline’s offer to "name your own price." Dynamic pricing, a potential "killer application" in many categories, could permit customers to make a wider variety of trade-offs between price and value than is possible in the current world, where most sellers offer a single fixed price to all buyers.
Can a marketer be trusted with sensitive personal and financial information? Consumers increasingly expect their identity and personal information to remain confidential when they go on-line to shop, and that, coupled with fear of on-line fraud, is what stops many consumers from even considering digital transactions.
Tools such as the software that creates personalized interfaces between e-businesses and customers hold tremendous promise for value exchange and contextual commerce. To be sure, the value of personalization has yet to be fully demonstrated in practice. (Fewer than 15 percent of visitors to Yahoo! have chosen to set up a "My Yahoo!" page for themselves.) Personalization tools also present risks, as well as real operational challenges, such as managing privacy, intrusiveness, and opportunity costs. For that reason, many practitioners still question the short-term return on investments in personalization tools.
Collaborative Tools
They facilitate word of mouth, or what might be called "branded person-to-person communications"—for instance, the ratings that buyers offer sellers on eBay, the Lands’ End "shop with a friend" feature, Raging Bull’s discussion boards, and Pert’s viral marketing (which encourages consumers to e-mail their friends instructions for obtaining free Pert Plus samples). Collaborative tools such as consumer ratings, though essential for content- and community-oriented digital brands, are underutilized.
Purchase-process Streamlining Tools
They eliminate such physical-world constraints as the need to walk into a store to purchase a product. Amazon’s one-click ordering system, for example, eases transactions by sparing repeat customers the inconvenience of inputting transaction data. Peapod’s shopping lists save consumers time by recording the products they purchased previously. The fact that most e-shoppers drop out of the buying process during the last clicks suggests that improvements along these lines might be very worthwhile.
Self-service Tools
They allow customers to obtain answers and results without the delays and inconsistencies that more often than not characterize human efforts to provide assistance. Such tools include software for tracking orders, preparing statements, and changing
addresses on-line. Although incumbents often have difficulty integrating these Web-based tools with legacy systems, the tools are indispensable for banks, retailers, and other e-businesses that handle large volumes of transactions.
Do-it-yourself product design tools
They allow consumers to customize products and services, either with the help of configuration options or from scratch. Dell Computer, for example, lets customers design their own systems on-line by choosing from a range of options; customers of Music.com and Listen.com can download the music of various artists onto a single compact disc. But the need to create manufacture-to-order systems to capture the potential of these tools may make them uneconomical in industries that, unlike software and music, are not based on information.
Dynamic-pricing tools
They overthrow the tyranny of the fixed retail price, allowing prices to fit the particular circumstances of individual transactions. Such tools, which come in many forms, include eBay’s and uBid’s auctions and Priceline’s offer to "name your own price." Dynamic pricing, a potential "killer application" in many categories, could permit customers to make a wider variety of trade-offs between price and value than is possible in the current world, where most sellers offer a single fixed price to all buyers.
Can a marketer be trusted with sensitive personal and financial information? Consumers increasingly expect their identity and personal information to remain confidential when they go on-line to shop, and that, coupled with fear of on-line fraud, is what stops many consumers from even considering digital transactions.