canyoutellme>生日快乐 英文电子商务的发展外文翻译
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The development of e-commerce
李晓璐>学英语的美剧When the technology bubble burst in 2000, the crazy valuations for online companies vanished with it, and many business folded. The survivors plugged on as best they could, encouraged by the growing number of internet urs. Now valuations are rising again and some of the dot-cons are making real profits, but the business world has become much more cautious about the internet’s potential. The funny thing is that the wild predictions made at the height of the boom?namely, that vast chunks of the world economy would move into cyberspace?are, in one way or another, coming true.成人电子游戏
The raw numbers tell only part of the story. According to America’s Department of Commerce, online retail sales in the world’s biggest market last year ro by 26%, to $55 billion. That sounds a lot of money, but it amounts to only 1.6% of total retail sales. The vast majority of people still buy most things in the good old “bricks-and-mortar” world.
B ut the commerce department’s figures deal with only part of the retail industry. For instance, they exclude online travel rvices, one of the most successful and fastest-growing ctors of e-commerce. InterActiveCorp IAC, the owner of expedia and hotels, alone sold $10 billion-worth of travel last year?and it has plenty of competition, not least from airlines, hotels and car-rental companies, all of which increasingly ll online.
Nor do the figures take in things like financial rvices, ticket-sales agencies, pornography a $2 billion business in America last year, according to Adult Video News, a trade magazine, online dating and a host of other activities, from tracing ancestors to gambling worth perhaps $6 billion worldwide. They also leave out purchas in grey markets, such as the online pharmacies that are thought to be responsible for a good proportion of the $700m that Americans spent last year on buying cut-price prescription drugs from across the border in Canada.
And there is more. The comm erce department’s figures include the fees earned by internet auction sites, but not the value of goods that are sold: an astonishing $24 billion-worth of trade was done last year on eBay, the biggest online auctioneer. Nor, by definition, do they include the billions of dollars-worth of goods bought and sold by business connecting to each other over the internet. Some of the B2B rvices are proprietary; for example, Wal-Mart tells its suppliers that
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they must u its own system if they want to be part of its annual turnover of $250 billion.
So e-commerce is already very big, and it is going to get much bigger. But the actual value of transactions currently concluded online is dwarfed by the extraordinary influence the internet is exerting over purchas carried out in the offline world. That influence is becoming an integral part of e-commerce.
To start with, the internet is profoundly changing consumer behaviour. One in five customers walking into a Sears department store in America to buy an electrical appliance will have rearched their purcha online?and most will know down to a dime what they intend to pay. More surprisingly, three out of four Americans start shopping for new cars online, even though most end up buying them from traditional dealers. The difference is that the customers come to the showroom armed with information about the car and the best available deals. Sometimes they even have computer print-outs identifying the particular vehicle from the dealer’s stock that they want t o buy Half of the 60m consumers in Europe who have an internet connection bought products offline after having investigated prices and details online, according to a study by Forrester, a rearch consultancyDifferent countries have different habits. In Italy and Spain, for instance, people are twice as likely to buy offline as online after rearching on the internet. But in Britain and Germany, the
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two most developed internet markets, the numbers are evenly split. Forrester says that people begin to shop online for simple, predictable products, such as DVDs, and then graduate to more complex items. Ud-car sales are now one of the biggest online growth areas in America.
任性的英文>reenPeople em to enjoy shopping on the internet, if high customer-satisfaction scores are any guide. Websites are doing ever more and cleverer things to rve and entertain their customers, and em t to take a much bigger share of people’s overall spending in the future.
This has enormous implications for business.A company that neglects its website may be committing commercial suicide. A website is increasingly becoming the gateway to a company’s brand, products and rvices?even if the firm does not ll online. A uless website suggests a uless company, and a rival is only a mou-click away. But even the coolest website will be lost in cyberspace if people cannot find it, so companies have to ensure that they appear high up in internet arch results.
For many urs, a arch site is now their point of entry to the internet. The best-known arch engine has already entered the lexicon: people say they have “Google” a company, a product or their plumber. The arch business has also developed one of the most effective forms of advertisin
g on the internet. And it is already the best way to reach some consumers: teenagers and young men spend more time online than
watching television. All this means that arch is turning into the internet’s next big battleground as Google defends itlf against challenges from Yahoo! and Microsoft.
The other way to get noticed online is to offer goods and rvices through one of the big sites that already get a lot of traffic. Ebay, Yahoo! and Amazon are becoming huge trading platforms for other companies. But to take part, a company’s product s have to stand up to inten price competition. People check online prices, compare them with tho in their local high street and may well take a peek at what customers in other countries are paying. Even if websites are prevented from shipping their goods abroad, there are plenty of web-bad entrepreneurs ready to oblige.
What is going on here is arbitrage between different sales channels, says Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. For instance, someone might u the internet to rearch digital cameras, but visit a photographic shop for a hands-on demonstration. “I’ll think about it,” they will tell the sales assistant. Back home, they will u a arch engine to find the lowest price and buy online. In this way, consumers are “deconstructing the purcha
sing process”, says Professor Sawhney. They are unbundling product information from the transaction itlf.
It is not only price transparency that makes internet consumers so powerful; it is also the way the net makes it easy for them to be fickle.
