Rational and emotional reasons why virtual supermarkets don't take off in the market of Bahia: How could we manage to change this reality? A case study of the extinct "MariaMercado".

Abstract

Brazilian electronic commerce is still not consolidated in many regions, supermarket shopping in the internet is still not a reality in some areas like the northeast of Brazil. We try to seek for the possible reasons, rational or emotional, for this cases of failures. A case study of the ‘MariaMercado’ virtual store in the city of Salvador/Bahia that went out of business because of insatisfactory results was conducted based on this evidence. Therefore the purpose of this work is to evaluate the reasons that are held responsible for the failure of effectively establishing a virtual supermarket and to point out possible alternatives for modification of this context, thus avoiding a similar outcome of future enterprises of this kind.