Categorizing commercial products for customer oriented online retailing

Online retailing can offer several benefits. In order to realize these benefits, a commercial web site needs to ameliorate its deficiencies due to the absence of actual physical products. Although the use and popularity of the Internet continues to increase, it is still unclear how online retailers can establish effective online retailing strategies to capitalize on their benefits. For this clarification, this paper proposes a framework to categorize products according to consumers' involvement and information quality fitness. Involvement refers to the degree of psychological identification or emotional ties consumers have with a particular product. Information quality fitness refers to the extent to which a product can fit with shopper's requirements for online information. Thirty-six commercial products are empirically tested. It is found that products can be grouped into four categories such as 'complex,' 'intelligent,' 'light,' and 'simple.' This categorization can help understand product characteristics when they are sold via the Internet. Our finding implies that online retailers need to formulate their retailing strategies in view of these product categories. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.