I am a big fan of online shopping. Yahoo Taiwan shopping is the case I choose as the research of this assignment this week.
Yahoo started its business as a search engine with a legendary beginning just like every famous enterprise. It’s now one of hugest internet search engine multinational cooperation. And now it turns into a kind of “cultural convergence creative industry”. I am interesting about its multi-aspects business. The whole company extends its branch into online shopping, journalism (although most of them didn’t come from yahoo itself), life information, webmail, finance, online dictionary, weather reports, movie review, online community and lots of topic discussion forums. Also, it connects the famous blog server in Taiwan. As an experienced online shopper, its increasing users and more and more completed shopping system intrigues me. Yahoo’s branches that located in different countries have great diversity. I have found something interesting and related to the topic of this week by my personal online shopping experience. Yahoo Taiwan online shopping started at 2000 with acquiring Kimo.
With taking 3 percent of the retailers’ sale price, it gains considerable revenue. Like most online shopping site, “comparison-shopping portal” is the feather in its cap. In 2005, Yahoo Taiwan added comparison-shopping portal into its online shop. Customers who want to buy certain stuff (almost everything, I have seen someone sales his house by Yahoo shopping) can enter keywords like search engine. Then, the result shows the same thing that sold by different retailers. Customers can compare the commodities by price, location, condition and the retailers with high rating. This is a very convenient function for the online shoppers. Also, Yahoo Taiwan provides power tools in this platform, such as retailers can pay for the primary search list which their commodities will appear at the top of the item list. With the combination to Yahoo’s role as search engine, the goods would show up as a result in the list related to the keywords you entered. There are many useful tools that enable the retailers and customers to organize their personal space (or account), this allow users receive e-mail notifies the order status and enables them to organize their shopping stuff, like wish list, track list, ordered item, payment check(with the connection to web ATM). The reading of this week that written by Mark Deuze(2007) reminds me an interesting phenomena that in this online market a person(or a username) can be both retailer and customer simultaneously. I use the username to buy things at this website and sale out the things I don’t need. This convergence culture shows the changing of Internet world. Every customer can rate the retailer after finishing every deal. The rating system the website provides becomes an important indicator to the customer. Once the a customer becomes a retailer, he or she will experience the totally different business role. They can accumulate their rating by both buy and sale things. In addition, I found its quite cool that retailer can design personalized online shop. Here are some beautiful examples.
Finally, the Yahoo acts like a keeper of the market instead of interfering the trade. This way, Yahoo gives its customers(both retailers and customers) a bigger personal space for media participation and a more convenient way to conduct customer-orientated business.
I love the example you pasted here, it’s very illustrative. I didn’t know Yahoo has online shopping section before, maybe because the function is not valid in China. I could tell that Yahoo Taiwan shopping has similar layout and functions as Taobao, China’s largest online marketplace. They are both popular sites because users have great control over their shopping experience. I didn’t use Yahoo very often, the major reason is that I always forgot the password to my yahoo mailbox. Now I log on MSN everyday just to get in my mailbox. As a result, I become a loyal user to MSN, but I rarely use the other services provided by MSN. I think when a technology company seeks multifunction of their websites, it faces many great challenges. Why Yahoo,kimo becomes successful is a case worth studying.
The online shopping portal provide users a virtual platform to build their own shop instead of living beneath yahoo. Shop owners can create their own brand value and even construct their own online payment system without yahoo’s. It seems that yahoo is a media provides some kind of “commercial service” for those shops. As the role of yahoo and the shop owners, according to Deuze,”it becomes crucial to understand the roles of the producer and the consumer as interchangeable and interdependent.” Neither of which can live without each other, and that’s why the message is perfected.
There is another trivia I would like to share here is that although yahoo takes certain percentage of the transaction, some of the seller will negotiate with the buyer to modify the final price in order to evade paying to yahoo. The transaction still exists with the original price but the seller need not to pay (or pay less) to yahoo.
Post 3 comments:
I don’t see how comparison shopping has any connection with Deuze’s article or consumers being producers. Comparison shopping is not new (your linked article is from 2005).
I understand that a person “can be both retailer and customer simultaneously,” but you would need to make a more convincing argument that this is a good example of the ideas in Deuze’s article. The rating system is a more appropriate example (like Amazon, which Deuze discusses in detail), but it’s not as involved as having customer reviews of the products and the retailers.