A Model for the Portuguese Online Retailers Adoption of Web 2.0 Tools

The Internet has become a major sales platform, assuming a growing importance in increasing the economic growth of a company. Therefore it is of great importance to analyse the incorporation of Web 2.0 tools and their relation to the website success and its design. Through a systematic exploration of the 36 most visited Portuguese e-commerce websites, according to the ranking published by Marktest, information was gathered about the adoption of Web 2.0 tools by these online retailers. Results indicate that the most frequently implemented tools are social networking, Rich Internet Application (RIA), mashups and Really Simple Syndication (RSS feeds). The least often adopted were semantic search, wikis and blogs. Based on these results and those in additional studies, an optimized model of Web 2.0 tools implementation is proposed for online retailers operating in Portugal. In the short term, it is suggested that the retailer should implement easier features which bring quicker success in terms of return on investments, such as social networking, mashups, RSS feeds and tagging, each one of which leads to a specific business benefit. In the medium-to-long term, it is suggested that retailers should adopt RIA-based features and podcasts/vodcasts. The adoption of these Web tools must be based on a complete and differentiated set tools.