به حداکثر رساندن ارزش مشتری از طریق خدمات الکترونیکی سفارشی سازی انبوه مصرف کننده

While the Internet provides an ideal marketplace for customized services, its strategic potential has yet to be fully realized. In particular, multi-seller (or “cross retail”) partnerships are the key to a largely unexploited Internet strategy for mass customizing bundles of goods or services as value-added solutions to individual customer needs. This article uses mass customization successes to advance cross retailing as a comprehensive strategy that frames current Web initiatives specifically in terms of customer value. Exploiting the strategy will necessitate an understanding of the enablers and dimensions of mass customized “e-consumer services” (i.e., e-tail services, as well as service-related consumer products, that are defined and sold via the Internet). The overall success of the broader Internet marketplace will be determined not just by industry-wide cooperation, but also by the development of rich standards that allow for the highly customized bundling of products. More importantly, service providers will be differentiated by their ability to employ powerful Web interfaces within a strategy that comprehensively supports and extends a customer-controlled customization process.

The Internet has advanced new profit initiatives by bringing technology-enhanced services directly to customers. As Wise and Baumgartner (1999) concluded, any shift toward services ultimately translates into the need for “creating new business models to capture profits at the customer's end of the value chain” (p. 133). Such a directive can help to explain why Dell Computers would abandon their back-end, business-to-business Web hub while still supporting retail-level partnerships aimed at bundling peripherals with their computers. Dell's focus on the customer, however, is not one-dimensional. It is enabled by a larger framework of initiatives that also includes well-developed supply chain relationships and efficiencies. In general, while customer-focused initiatives may emphasize specific types of enablers, achieving an overall strategic position would benefit from a larger framework that can comprehensively organize the strategy.

In analyses of Internet-enabled customer value, Wheeler (2002) argues that the key challenge of e-commerce is to convert enabling technologies into opportunities for creating customer value, and Wells and Gobeli (2003) propose that the interaction between customizability and online products provides an ideal opportunity to create customer value. While there exist numerous Internet strategies of technology-enabled value, the framework developed in this article emphasizes the extensive potential of mass-customized e-consumer services, and the challenges and opportunities of cross e-tailing in an integrated marketplace. Ultimately, as the Internet marketplace advances toward common standards driven by industry-wide XML initiatives, the ability to fully exploit cross e-tailing opportunities will depend, in large part, on the ability of e-consumer service providers to effectively implement comprehensive strategies that facilitate the selling of mass customized solutions.