These days, one of the keys to the successful use of electronic commerce in business-to-consumer (B2C) relations is how businesses track and react to consumer behavior and how they maintain their customer relationships. The ability to analyze such behavior goes a long way to assisting businesses to determine the difference between their high and low value customers and to devote different levels of resources to them accordingly.

In “Electronic Commerce and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Relations”, an article from the most recent issue of the Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations (Editor-in-Chief: Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, Information Resources Management Association, USA) researchers Stephen Burgess and Stan Karanasios, Victoria University (Australia) examine customer behavior and relationship management over the Internet.

“Other factors, such as the trust that consumers have in the security of Web sites of sellers will influence whether they will make online purchases, and this can even surpass added-value factors or even discount prices,” write Burgess and Karanasios.

Burgess and Karanasios additionally point to other aspects of online retailing such as recurring positive experiences and trust of retailer as also impacting purchase decisions of online consumers. As for the future of the industry, the Victoria University researchers look to Web 2.0 as presenting a possible influence on customer behavior.

(Portions of this article were taken from the Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations.)