Japanese Students’ Behavior Toward E-Commerce - IT Enabled Services - page 172

Chapter 11
Japanese Students' Behavior Toward
E-Commerce

Takashi Okamoto and Nobuyuki Soga

11.1 Introduction

With an increase in the use of information and communication technology (ICT)
devices and the broadband environment in Japan, more diverse types of people are
accessing various affordable, high-speed Internet services. The expansion of ICT
affects our daily lives, giving us new options for purchasing goods and services. For
example, we can easily obtain specific information on goods and services from the
Internet and read other buyers' reviews. With such benefits, purchasing goods and
services from online shops has become common.
Therefore, Internet selling has spread; even people with little knowledge of ICT
find it easy to sell their goods at online malls and auction sites. In the ICT
environment, we can consider electronic commerce (EC) as IT-enabled services
and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales as a common EC service.
Japan's B2C market was worth 7.8 trillion yen in 2010, up 16.3 % from the
previous year. The EC ratio, a measure of EC expansion, increased to 0.4 points
from the previous year to reach 2.5 % ( Ministry of Economy, Trade and Indus-
try2010 ). As this report notes, commercial transaction computerization has been
evolving and growing. Another report shows that 53.6 % of Internet users used B2C
in 2010 (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan 2011a ). In Japan,
46.9 % of Internet users indicated “purchasing goods and services” as their purpose
for using the Internet via a PC, and 30.1 % indicated the same purpose for using
their mobile phone (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan
2011b ). This shows that B2C is commonly used as an important element of the
consumer market, not only in Japan but worldwide.
Although B2C shops are not always profitable, their number has been increasing.
In fact, only 32.2 % of online shops make profit, 46 % suffer losses, and 25.5 %