Content area
Full Text
Keywords Internet, Food industry, Organic food, Agriculture, Marketing, Co-operatives
Abstract This paper is concerned with the impact of e-commerce on agro-food marketing. First, a theoretical framework is specified for the Internet as a marketing tool with emphasis on the agro-food and organic food sections. Subsequently we present the results of a survey that was conducted in order to investgate how Cretan agricultural cooperatives use or tend to use the business methodology of e-commerce. Consumers and managers of cooperatives in Crete reveal their expectations from the new technology. From this survey valuable information is gained about the practical relations between e-commerce and the agro-food market on the island, and divergence from the theoretical framework is noticed,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0007-070X.htm
Introduction
The revolution in information technology (IT) and communications changed the way people conduct business today. Managers and academic researchers are predicting the huge potential of the latest networking technologies in business. They forecast that the size of online trading revenues in the next few years will vary from a few hundred billion to a few trillion dollars. Today, the e before words like commerce, business, marketing, etc., indicates a philosophy that must be followed by companies and organizations that want to keep their competitiveness.
E-commerce refers to conducting business electronically. The technology of e-commerce includes a variety of systems; from fax, to intranets, extranets and the Internet. Although systems like electronic data interchange (EDI) and electronic fund transfer (EFT) were in use since the early 1970s, the explosion of e-commerce took place in the early 1990s, when the rapid diffusion of the Internet and World Wide Web made conducting business over the Internet much cheaper and easier. The Internet is now considered as an established channel for commercial transactions. It is a worldwide market with hundred millions of buyers and sellers, a place for every kind of transaction and every type of business, a powerful medium for marketing activities.
The benefits provided by e-commerce are many; with the most important the reduction in costs and transaction times, when a company goes on line. To benefit totally from the available opportunities, companies must be prepared to adopt and develop suitable electronic strategies of conducting...