Abstract
As competition intensifies in the $127 billion homecenter industry (1998 data), homecenter retailers are implementing electronic commerce technologies in order to generate and maintain competitive advantages. Internet technologies give companies an alternate method of expanding their trading communities, thus creating a streamlined supply chain and reducing costs (6). This research was designed to explore how internet technologies are impacting a key retail channel for forest products: the homecenter retail industry. The study sample consisted of the 500 largest homecenter retail companies (by sales) in the United States, This group of large homecenters represented over 75 percent of the total homecenter industry sales in 1998 (10). Study results show that 87 percent of the homecenter respondents had access to the Internet in 1998 and 57 percent of these companies used the Internet for company promotion via home pages. Results also showed that in 1998, 32 percent and 13 percent of respondents had intranets and extranets, respectively. As expected, large homecenter retail respondents are lead adopters for these important Internet technologies.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 32-37 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Forest Products Journal |
Volume | 52 |
Issue number | 1 |
State | Published - Jan 2002 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Forestry
- General Materials Science
- Plant Science