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Chapter 2 E-commerce fundamentals 71

Offline journey Mixed-mode journey Online journey
Awareness Local property
of agent paper Word-of-mouth Search engine Search engine

Search and vs Estate agents vs Portal:
select agents Go to agents site Rightmove

Negotiation At home At home Book online

Viewings
Monthly letter Phone/e-mail E-mail/text
feedback

Example channel chain map for consumers selecting an estate agent to
Figure 2.10
sell their property

Developing ‘channel chains’ which help us understand multi-channel behaviour is a power-
ful technique recommended by McDonald and Wilson (2002) for analysing the changes in a
marketplace introduced by the Internet. A channel chain shows different customer journeys
for customers with different channel preferences. It can be used to assess the current and
future performance of these different customer journeys. An example of a channel chain is
shown in Figure 2.10. A market map can be used to show the flow of revenue between a
manufacturer or service provider and its customers through traditional intermediaries and
new types of intermediaries. For example, Thomas and Sullivan (2005) give the example of a
US multi-channel retailer that used cross-channel tracking of purchases through assigning
each customer a unique identifier to calculate channel preferences as follow: 63% bricks-
and-mortar store only, 12.4% Internet-only customers, 11.9% catalogue-only customers,
11.9% dual-channel customers and 1% three-channel customers. This shows the future
potential for further growth and suggests that different strategies need to be developed to
appeal to each group.

Different types of online intermediary

As we showed through Figure 2.3, identifying different types of online intermediary as
Infomediary potential partners to promote an e-business is a key part of marketplace analysis. In this sec-
A business whose main tion, we take a more in-depth look at the different types of intermediaries and the business
source of revenue derives and revenue models they adopt.
from capturing consumer
information and Sarkar et al. (1996) identified many different types of new intermediaries (mainly from a
developing detailed B2C perspective) which they refer to using the dated term ‘cybermediaries’. Hagel and Ray-
profiles of individual
customers for use by port (1997) use ‘infomediary’ specifically to refer to sale of customer information. See Box 2.2
third parties. for further information on this concept and the related concept of the metamediary.