Modeling Consumer Adoption of the Internet as a Shopping Medium: ...

Still another stream of research has explored the impact of product category on consumer shopping behavior in this new environment.

However, a review of the relevant research revealed several gaps that merit further consideration. First, most of the previous research on Internet shopping takes a marketing or consumer behavior perspective, simply extending existing theories and frameworks developed from the traditional retail environment (e.g., store retailing and catalogue retailing) to the new and innovative virtual marketplace. These approaches may lead to limited or ineffective marketing strategies in Internet retailing, thereby inhibiting adoption of the Internet as a shopping medium by consumers. For instance, online shopping is often viewed simply as buying and selling products or services over the Internet. This limited conceptualization may lead Internet retailers to use the Internet only as a promotion and transaction tool and thus leave other commercial opportunities such as a better retail communication mix, involving customers’ coproduction, underdeveloped. Understanding online consumer behavior from an innovation perspective is clearly necessary if Internet retailers are to expand their view of the Internet as a marketspace with a huge potential to increase their share of wallet.