[Abstract]
This paper presents an analysis of how the business models of organizations are getting transformed in the Marketspace created by the Internet. We use a research model comprising the transformation scores of four Ps(Product, Price, Promotion, and Place) as dependent variables and three dimensions, Demographics, Technology, and Community elements on the Websites, as explaining variables about the Cyber Transformation of the 4Ps.
While most existing literatures have focused on Website's technology, our research model includes 22 five-point-scale items; 10 Demographics/Technology items and 12 Community items(Visitor Guide, number and quality of bulletin boards, club activation, vision, offline activity, member participation in Website design, consulting, entertainment contents, quality of contents, site/partner links).
To measure the 4P's transformation score, the authors ed 12 workable items from the Marketspace Model by Dutta, Kwan, & Segev(1997). A sample of 97 shopping mall Websites comprising two categories(jewelry/accessory and cosmetics) from the list published by 100hot.co.kr are evaluated by six panel groups and the data is analyzed by the SPSSWIN 8.0 version.
The result shows that there are five significant factors, Technology, Interaction, Connectedness, Business Features, and Domain, while the average transformation scores of 4Ps are at very low level. The factor scores are used in regression analysis for each P. Two factors, Technology and Interaction are influencing all four Ps; Connectedness is influencing only two, Product and Price. Organizations must not simply take their existing business models. They have to adopt the Technology items(navigation, logo, e-mail, graphics, structure) and to facilitate the Interaction items(consulting, number and quality of bulletin boards, participation, offline events) and Connectedness(club activation, contents, partner/site link, entertainment contents) in order to get transformed in the Marketspace successfully in the near future.