8 CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
8.2 P OSSIBLE RESEARCH QUESTIONS IN THE FUTURE
Even though e-commerce is a relatively new concept, it is a much studied topic in the business to consumer markets. E-commerce requires continuous studying because of its constantly evolving nature. During this thesis project some interesting additional research topics have risen and presented below.
To begin with, it would be interesting to study how the increasing number of users and developing technology will evolve and challenge the e-commerce business in the future. It would be relevant and interesting to study and discover what kind of changes and challenges e-commerce will face and how the entire e-e-commerce business is going to evolve and transform in the future, when the number of users increase and technology issues develop constantly further. Also, e-commerce is a wide concept, and a variety of new businesses and applications are emerging constantly. It would be interesting to examine how different companies can utilize the value of e-commerce and how effectively they can create and explore new businesses outside the current e-commerce boundaries.
Secondly, it would be interesting to examine how e-commerce business will phase thereto targeted challenges and are those in this master´s thesis founded key factors still important in the future. It is obvious that key business model factors are constantly changing and founded key business model factors ma not be as important in the future. Clearly new vital business
model factors will be born. The study of this area would be able to focus on comparing current accepted standards and traditional practices to modern way to implement e-commerce.
Thirdly, regardless of pure e-commerce companies, markets are full of traditionally operating companies. It would be relevant to study how those companies operating by traditional manners benefit from e-commerce possibilities as an additional value producer. Modern Omni Channel Retailing (OCR) concept implies that customers are expecting convenient shopping experience with freedom and flexibility to test and try, return conditions in the case of dissatisfaction and moreover possibility to utilize various shopping channels such mobile Internet devices, catalogue and traditional brick-and-mortar.
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APPENDIX
Appendix 1. Finland in comparison with China, according Hofstede centre (2015).
Appendix 2. Russia in comparison with United States, according Hofstede centre (2015).
Appendix 3. Finnish e-commerce companies comparison (Koski & Kärkkäinen 2015)
Appendix 4. Business model canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur 2010)
Appendix 5. Top selling Internet items (Statisticbrain 2015)
Appendix 6. Online browsing and buying intentions (Nielsen 2014)
Appendix 7. Typical sales message from Amazon.com e-commerce (Amazon 2015)
Appendix 8. Typical sales message from AliExpress.com e-commerce (Alibaba 2015)
Appendix 9. Implemented student survey. Explained attitudes and behaviors of e-commerce business in university life.