Online Promotion of the E-Commerce Websites in Retail Market in China: An Empirical Study

2. Literature Review

E-commerce can be described as “any form of business transaction in which the parties interact electronically rather than by physical exchanges or direct physical contact” (Ecom, 1998), and is generally classified as B2B, B2C, C2C and C2B e-commerce (Madu & Madu, 2002). Jennifer et al. (2003) argue that B2B e-commerce seems to be driven by global forces, whereas B2C seems to be more of a local phenomenon. While along with the advancement of information technology, there are increasingly online customers buying products on the e-commerce websites. Many related researches have been done on improving effectiveness of the e-commerce websites (Thorleuchter & Poel, 2012; Li & Li, 2011; Nielsen, 1999; Nielsen & Tahir, 2001).However, a study by Elliot and Fowell (2000) show that the online customers have been relatively frustrated with the quality of the websites they visited.