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The turbulent and variable environment, in which businesses operate, requires high flexibility. It allows them to react quickly to changes in market, customer expectations and needs. Flexibility is widely studied, but is not well-known in e-commerce yet. The purpose of this article is to study e-commerce flexibility on the basis what can be obtained from the customer interface without interfering in internal processes. The data source is also the experiment based on simulations of a series of possible customer inquiries to an online seller. Evaluation of flexibility is conducted based on the concept of e-service flexibility described by Jin and Oriaku (2013, pp. 1123-1136). It is proposed to examine the relative information flexibility, the relative flexibility of transaction execution, the relative responsiveness and to compare them with relative e-commerce performance. Six randomly selected Polish online bookstores took part in the study. The multiple case study method is used. Results show a comparative evaluation of flexibility researched e-bookstores, and these were discussed. The study shows that the proposed method of assessment of flexibility is a valuable tool for managing flexibility in e-commerce businesses.
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