Internet retailing offers consumers considerable choices
in terms of where to shop and purchase. For example, a
search of several products on mySimon, a popular price
comparison engine, reveals more than three dozen retailers
for online books, more than 70 retailers offering printers,
and more than 100 digital camera retailers. Many of these
retailers are small compared with the big players in the
category. For example, the Internet book retailer a1Books
has less than 1% of the reach (number of viewers who visit
the site) of Barnesandnoble.com (B&N). There are dozens
of similarly small Internet booksellers that compete with
one another and the considerably larger firms of Amazon.
com and B&N for a wide assortment of books. What characterizes
the price promotion strategies among these many
large and small retailers?