The impact of implementing innovative techniques in B2C e-commerce

In the current competitive markets the biggest challenge for the companies is to apply latest innovations in order to keep their position or in the worst case to survive. Their success depends on many facts but it is essential to highlight the importance of the ability of adapting to fluctuating environments that everyday become more demanding. On the other hand, e-commerce had given access to a broad market and to new customers with higher access to information; with different ways of communication and with open discussions about their desires and needs. For this reason, managers have to be aware of these facts in order to keep their level of competitiveness and growth. Managers have also to measure the effectiveness of the implementation of innovation that depends on factors that they attend to control and also of external factors that in most of the cases they can’t prevent. It also depends on many variables: cultural aspects, development level of the country, technology and so on. As a matter of fact, the reasoning for deciding to invest on innovation or not becomes complex. The main purpose of this study is to provide a first approach for helping managers to make decisions regarding to the implementation of innovation in the B2c e-Commerce sector. The scope was limited to measure the impact in direct variables affecting the turnover of the B2c e-commerce channel. The reasoning was done based on the achievement of B2c e-Commerce success using a value framework provided by the Osservatorio eCommerce B2c from the Politecnico di Milano. In order to analyze this framework, it was chosen the Analytic Hierarchy Process method with the purpose of finding which factors are more relevant to the value framework considering two innovation proposals: Semantic Web and Crowdsourcing. The input to this method was the opinion of experts in both fields.