 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
Seoul—differ from most western urban areas in another dimension that inhibits the
proliferation of B2C e-commerce—the vertical
dimension. Most people in Asian
cities are housed in high-rise building complexes that are miniature cities. (The
Mongkok district of Hong Kong is said to be the most densely populated place on
earth.) At the base of residential and office buildings, people have access to public
transportation and a myriad of conveniences—restaurants and stores selling food,
sundries, entertainment items (reading matter, music, videos), clothing, housewares,
furniture, jewelry, and more. People hardly need to travel at all to obtain either the
necessities or the luxuries of life. And when they do, the businesses they buy from
will usually deliver—a practice made practical by the geographic compactness of
many Asian cities.
The homes in which Asian people live are, on average, extremely small by US
standards. In Hong Kong the typical government-provided flat is a mere 300 square
feet—and that flat may accommodate a family of three generations. Even when
family income is sufficient to buy a PC, there is often no place at home to put one.
Anyway, for obvious reasons, people don’t spend much time in their homes. In
Singapore, for example, many families take most of their meals in the public eating
houses on the ground floors of their housing estates. As a result of such living
arrangements, home PC penetration in parts of Asia is low¹
(Dedrick and Kraemer,
2000), and Internet use is often more likely to occur in public places than in the
home. About half of the people with Internet access in China, for example, log on
from Internet
cafes (a big business in Beijing!) or other public places—a factor
believed likely to dampen prospects for online purchasing (Smith, 2001).
Even in Singapore, where 44% of the population has access to the Internet,
only 16% of Internet users have conducted purchase transactions online (Kuo et.
al, 2001). In the US, where almost two-thirds have access to the Internet, over
50% have transacted online (Cole et al, 2000). The ease of access to most shopping
facilities in compact Asian cities reduces the
impact of the convenience afforded by
Internet shopping. The lack of prior experience with traditional catalog shopping
also makes online catalog shopping an unfamiliar proposition. Martinsons (forth-
coming) describes the case of Medcox Lane, a Shanghai-based online retailer: the
company was founded in 1996 as one of the first mail order businesses in China.