Is this the beginning of the end for retail websites? A professional perspective

For many years, the death knell for high street shopping has been sounded by the pioneers of online. The high street brands responded with some success by counterbalancing their "bricks and mortar" realm with a virtual world of e-commerce. New work published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, suggests that the end may well be in sight for retail websites.

Ricardo Ramos and Sérgio Moro of the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, and Paulo Rita of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, have investigated the attitudes and behavior of marketing professionals with respect to social media and commercial mobile applications and found that online strategy is focusing very much on search engine positioning and thence retail websites rather than the former two overlapping and interconnected realms.

The team suggests that this flies in the face of consumer attitudes and experience where 90 percent of most user time online is on social media and apps and only 10 percent involves using search engines to find specific websites. Where there is resistance to accepting this reality, marketing professionals must disconnect themselves from an out-moded approach and face up to users where users are active online.