Reintermediation
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Reintermediation can be defined as the reintroduction of an intermediary between end users (consumers) and a producer. This term applies especially to instances in which disintermediation has occurred first.
Although at the beginnings of the Internet revolution, electronic commerce brought the idea of disintermediation to many producers, as a way of cutting costs or increasing profits, many (if not most) of those producers found out that it was not so easy. It was thought that the Internet would "disintermediate" middlemen and drive them out of business by having producers sell directly to users.
However, what these predictions missed was that cutting out the middleman brought problems such as the high cost of handling to ship small orders, dealing with massive amounts of customer service issues and confronting the wrath of retailers and other channel partners. Producers did not consider that they had to spend huge resources to accommodate presales & postsales issues of individual consumers. Before disintermediation, those middlemen acted as salespeople for the producers. After disintermediation, somebody had to handle those customers. Furthermore, producers did not consider that selling online also has high costs: Developing the web site, maintaining the information & marketing expenses to draw online customers.
Maybe most importantly, producers did not consider the fact that being the only source of their products for online consumers is similar to having only one store in a city selling a particular brand. Many thousands or even millions of web middlemen are pushing their own products and spending money to draw customers to their web sites. So if a producer shuns those middlemen, it gets less "shelf space" on the web and therefore the decrease of the probability of getting online sales for their products.
Both reintermediation and disintermediation are results of the dynamic nature of the Internet.
Examples of companies
The most notable exception to disintermediation is Dell, which has succeeded in creating a brand, well recognized by consumers, profitable and with continuous growth. Likewise, maybe the most notable example to reintermediation is the Levi Strauss company, who unsuccessfully launched a multimillion dollar web site and later shut down most of its online operations.
Quotes
"Already, electronic commerce mavens are talking about 'reintermediation,' in which a new breed of Web middleman will rise to make sense out of the chaos wrought by disintermediation." —Jack Shafer, "The Web Made Me Do It," The New York Times