E-commerce refers to the use of the Internet to market, buy and sell goods and services, exchange information, and create and maintain web-based relationships between participant entities (Fruhling and Digman, 2000). Based on its demonstrated impact in industrial retail markets (Elia, Lefebvre, and Lefebvre 2007), e-commerce is believed to have the potential to increase profitability in agricultural markets by increasing sales and decreasing search and transactions costs. The creation of electronic markets that are expected to be more transparent and competitive than physical markets may attract more consumers by increasing demand and improving the firm’s strategic position with customers seeking specific niche products or having geographical restrictions (Batte and Ernst, 2007; and Montealegre, Thompson and Eales, 2007). However, due to the relatively new state of e-commerce in agriculture, its impact has not been widely measured and documented. We developed an evaluation framework and applied it to measuring the performance of the agricultural e-commerce platform MarketMaker. The analysis focuses on the impact of MarketMaker on producers and farmers’ markets and consists of both the perceived impacts based on survey responses and a willingness–to-pay analysis, as well as the examination of factors that affect the impacts of the website. Our findings provide guidance for future development of agricultural e-commerce-enabling platforms like MarketMaker, as well as future evaluation efforts of these platforms.
Authors: Carlos E. Carpio, Olga Isengildina-Massa, R. David Lamie, and Samuel D. Zapata
Publisher: Choices
Year: 2013