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Top1. Introduction
With the advent of the Internet, consumer-buying behavior has started to change permanently. Thanks to its convenient nature, online shopping has become the preferred medium of consumption for consumers all around the world. This trend has accelerated in the recent years. Owing to the ever-increasing mobile penetration rates and increased adoption of smartphones, this change has become more prevalent in the recent years. As one of the parts of this trend, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has started to be a preferred way of conducting business with the brands. As such, global adoption of e-commerce paved the way to a substantial increase in e-commerce growth rates. B2C e-commerce share of total global retail sales has almost doubled in 5 years.
E-Commerce can be defined as the use of digital medium to conduct business transactions (WTO, 2020). Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce has a special importance by enabling trade for consumers worlwide, providing more convenient ways of shopping. As a consequence, businesses should take e-commerce into account when formulating their strategies. Therefore, scholars as well as marketing and brand managers have to tailor their efforts toward e-commerce environment.
In explaining the rise of e-commerce medium, some unique characteristics of e-commerce environment are worth noting. First, e-commerce enables individuals all around the world to buy from anywhere at anytime (Rohm et al., 2004). E-commerce enables increased value-add by providing place utility (location independency) and time utility (being able to buy on a 7/24 basis). Additionally, online consumers seek more variety (Donthu et al., 1999). Wide product portfolio, that is, offering a broader array of product assortments is also critical for providing a better shopping experience (Kim et al., 2003). Product portfolio has even increased more, and thus, has become more important nowadays as global giant e-commerce web sites like Amazon, eBay etc. dominate the e-commerce markets by providing one-stop-shopping experience to their online consumers (Srinivasan et al. 2002). As such, this study analyzes product portfolio’s effect on customer perceived value, brand loyalty and purchase intention in the context of e-commerce.The recent Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, in particular, has brought about the fact that even elderly people who are not so acquainted with the online medium have felt the need to use online shopping as the sole method for fulfilling their needs to survive during lockdown.Shopping of all kinds of necessities is now possible through global e-commerce websites like Amazon.com. Even niche products that are not available in physical stores can conveniently be found in the e-commerce environment. The e-commerce adoption rate increased sharply from 13 percent to 30 percent in a single year, which was projected to reach in 5 years (Salesforce, 2020). First time digital consumers account for about 40 percent of the growth in e-commerce consumption. These developments have paved the way for e-commerce web sites to further expand and enrich their product offerings to meet the needs of their consumers. Product portfolio, that is, the width and depth of products, offered in e-commerce web sites has become an important factor in the competitive e-commerce environment. Consumers increasingly spend more time dealing with e-commerce giants like Amazon, eBay, AliExpress as the means for “one-stop shopping”, searching for all kinds of products. Hence, wide product portfolio has become a sought-after criterion in e-commerce web sites. In fact, wide product portfolio is a decisive factor of e-commerce due to the fact that consumers can find everything, including even the niche items that cannot be found elsewhere on e-commerce web sites. Product portfolio is increasingly important in today’s world as consumers from all around the world increasingly resort to e-commerce for fulfilling their needs of all types in the post-pandemic marketing environment.