cts for online retailing are bright, with predicted sales of around $5 billion by the beginning of the new century (Etzel, Stanton, and Walker 394). Many of the sites that I have visited are now involved in many innovative ideas to promote their products. Among them is the personal information file, where consumers can fill out a form with an e-mail address, in order to receive a weekly information about sales, products, incentives, contests, and seasonal fashions. As consumer behavior changes, technology will adapt to its needs. Sooner or later, I predict that databases will be so advanced, that on-line marketers will be capable of identifying the needs and behaviors of the consumer market. Perhaps consumers will not need to fill out the time consuming personal information form, thus getting e-mails from the companies that we visit or interested in. As a matter of fact, some of the largest commercial sites on the World Wide Web have agreed to feed information about their customers reading, shopping and entertainment habits into a new and improved database system that is now tracking the moves of more than 30 million Internet users, recording where they go, and what they read, often without the users knowledge. This agreement by participating Web sites is primarily used for direct-advertising, it promises to deliver precise, direct, and personalized ads, specifically for that target user. Eventhough this is said to be an invasion of privacy, many of the powerful commercial sites are using, selling, and distributing these consumer behaviors and informations to numerous retailers, advertisers, and marketers for direct-advertising use. Many advertising and marketing experts believe that direct-mail online is only in its early developmental stages. As an evolving mass medium, online direct-mail advertising is where radio was in 1920, where television was in 1950, and where cable was during 1970. All of these, you may have...
