Web 2.0 Tools In Retailing: Benefits Of Their Use And Reasons For Not Using Them

Abstract

The term Web 2.0 was introduced by O’Reilly (2005) as the new stage in the Internet evolution referring to a collection of online applications sharing a number of common characteristics: “The Web as a platform, Harnessing of the Collective Intelligence, Data is the Next Intel Inside, End of the Software Release Cycle, Lightweight Programming Models, Rich User Experiences”. The term Web 2.0 or Social Media refers to applications enabling the creation, editing and dissemination of user-generated content. These applications are one of the main components of the current Internet environment commonly called Web 2.0. The importance and popularity of the Social Media as marketing tools and communication channels is growing and field studies provide evidence that these can strongly affect consumer behavior. An increasing number of studies suggest that corporate interest on the Web 2.0 domain keeps growing and more and more firms are introducing different social media tools into their daily business routines as well as into their marketing strategies. Despite the fact that thousands of corporations are already seriously engaged or experimenting with the Social Media as marketing tools there is also a high amount of retailers that do not use them. The objective of this study is to analyze the reasons why retailers do not use Web 2.0 tools and the main barriers that they consider to not adopt them, comparing with the retailers that use these tools.