Impact of internet in marketing - Essay Example

Internet marketing, which is called e-tailing in computer-speak, is the selling of retail goods online that radically transformed the existing market structures - mostly for the best (Cassiman & Sieber, 2002). When it was started in 1997 by such companies as Dell Computer, Amazon.com and Auto-by-Tel, many thought it could never replace the traditional mode of face-to-face marketing because of the socially enriching experience of personally touching and appraising the quality of goods you want to buy and haggling with the vendors.

This prognostication was proven wrong by the 10 million purchases made online at the initial year, and by 2004, the value of online trade globally reached $3.14 trillion, up from $350.30 billion in 2000 (Andan, 2003). This paper looks into the factors that attracted more and more businesses to online marketing, focusing its attention on the impact of the Internet on the very concept of marketing and the benefits of this specialized type of marketing as compared to traditional brick-and-mortar selling.

The study also seeks out the advantages and disadvantages of Internet marketing so that upstart companies planning to bring their marketing activity to the Net will know what to expect and what to avoid. Both new and well-established corporations and small and medium enterprises are turning to the Internet to create new markets and reorganize their existing markets. This marketing platform is ubiquitous and low-cost to make it a potent force for maximizing the growth of any company with some IT knowledge and capability (Kiang & Chi, 2001).

All this began in 1990 when the US National Science Foundation approved the use of the Internet for non-academic use, primarily marketing and commerce. It took three years before the worldwide web phenomenon became possible and by 1993 some 5 million people were using the new technology for marketing applications. The number leaped to 62 million in 1997 and by 1998, there were 100 million users around the world. Internet traffic continued to double every 100 days, according to pioneering Internet provider Unmet Technologies, thus drawing the popular observation that the Internet achieved "one of the fastest adoption rates any technology has every experienced (Brynjolfsson & Smith, 2002).

" The changes wrought by the Internet is believed even better than the communication revolution effected by the telephone, which established connection between only two or several nodes. The Internet allows the simultaneous exchange of information in digital form among an unlimited number of nodes. At the click of a mouse, any owner of a connected computer can access and create vast amounts of information, images and opinions. The Internet user can even access processes and procedures previously cordoned off in back offices and data processing centers of government agencies and corporations.

Today, the popular applications of the Internet in business include online auctions, travel booking, shopping in cybermalls, home banking, online stock trading, insurance and mortgage services (Andan, 2003). It was just a matter of time before the Internet gained acceptance as a modern-day platform for marketing. At least three forces directed the world's attention to the rich possibilities of the