Chapter 5: Electronic Commerce Project


Using Internet Newsgroups for Online Market Research

You are producing hiking boots that you are selling through a few stores at this time. You think your boots are more comfortable than those of your competition. You believe you can undersell many of your competitors if you can significantly increase your production and sales. You would like to use the Internet discussion groups interested in hiking, climbing, and camping to both sell your boots and to make them well known. Visit Google’s Usenet archives (http://groups.google.com), which stores discussion postings from many thousands of newsgroups. Through this site you can locate all relevant newsgroups and search them by keyword, author’s name, forum, date, and subject. Review recent postings, choose a message, and examine it carefully, noting all the information you can obtain, including information about the author.

1. How could you use these newsgroups to market your boots?
   
2. What ethical principles might you be violating if you use these messages to sell your boots? Do you think there are ethical problems in this type of use of the newsgroups? Explain your answer.
   
3. Decide whether you want to use the newsgroups to locate Web sites on the topic being searched for the hiking boots industry. Examine the various sites to determine whether there are other ways to draw potential buyers to the Web site you may decide to establish.
   
4. Next go to Yahoo.com to search for the hiking boots industry and locate sites that will help you develop other new ideas for contacting potential customers.
   
5. Given what you have learned in this and previous chapters, prepare a plan to use newsgroups and other alternative methods to begin attracting visitors to your site.