Elsevier

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Volume 156, 1 November 2015, Pages 97-103
Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Exploring the e-cigarette e-commerce marketplace: Identifying Internet e-cigarette marketing characteristics and regulatory gaps

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2015.08.032Get rights and content

Highlights

  • E-cigarette online vendors were reviewed for location, sales and marketing strategies, and age verification.

  • Vendors heavily used social network services and used different sales promotion strategies to market products.

  • Over 1/3rd of vendors had no detectable age verification process and those that did largely required only a click-thru verification.

Abstract

Background

The electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) market is maturing into a billion-dollar industry. Expansion includes new channels of access not sufficiently assessed, including Internet sales of e-cigarettes. This study identifies unique e-cigarette Internet vendor characteristics, including geographic location, promotional strategies, use of social networking, presence/absence of age verification, and consumer warning representation.

Methods

We performed structured Internet search engine queries and used inclusion/exclusion criteria to identify e-cigarette vendors. We then conducted content analysis of characteristics of interest.

Results

Our examination yielded 57 e-cigarette Internet vendors including 54.4% (n = 31) that sold exclusively online. The vast majority of websites (96.5%, n = 55) were located in the U.S. Vendors used a variety of sales promotion strategies to market e-cigarettes including 70.2% (n = 40) that used more than one social network service (SNS) and 42.1% (n = 24) that used more than one promotional sales strategies. Most vendors (68.4%, n = 39) displayed one or more health warnings on their website, but often displayed them in smaller font or in their terms and conditions. Additionally, 35.1% (n = 20) of vendors did not have any detectable age verification process.

Conclusions

E-cigarette Internet vendors are actively engaged in various promotional activities to increase the appeal and presence of their products online. In the absence of FDA regulations specific to the Internet, the e-cigarette e-commerce marketplace is likely to grow. This digital environment poses unique challenges requiring targeted policy-making including robust online age verification, monitoring of SNS marketing, and greater scrutiny of certain forms of marketing promotional practices.

Introduction

Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) were virtually unknown ten years ago, but are now rapidly growing in popularity in various countries (Ayers et al., 2011). This novel electronic consumer product, first introduced in the United States in 2007, converts concentrated liquid nicotine (e-liquid) into a vapor, which is then inhaled, or “vaped” by the user through different delivery systems (e.g., look-alikes, pen-style, “Mods”, and disposables; Farsalinos and Polosa, 2014, Huang et al., 2014b, Yamin, 2010). The growing popularity of e-cigarettes can be measured by their burgeoning sales in countries such as the U.S., a primary market for e-cigarettes. In 2007, U.S. sales brought in a modest $5 million per annum with sales now estimated at some $2.2 billion as of May 2014 accompanied by rapid increases in promotional expenditures (Herzog et al., 2014a, Kornfield et al., 2015). The product landscape is wide and varied, with an estimated 460 brands and thousands of flavors available for sale in brick-and-mortar “vape” shops, in chain convenience stores, as well as from online vendors (Herzog et al., 2014a, Zhu et al., 2014).

Historically, the e-cigarette industry has not been subject to regulation or advertising restrictions, which has encouraged uncontrolled market expansion. As a result, advertising expenditures tripled from 2011 to 2012, when the industry spent $18.3 million on magazine, television, newspaper and Internet ads (Kim et al., 2014). Although e-cigarette Internet advertising expenditures are lower than expenditures in traditional media formats (i.e., print, TV), the Internet's growth potential as a cheap and accessible marketing tool to promote e-cigarette uptake needs to be examined. In fact, industry analysts now estimate that online sales make up approximately 25–30% of the $2.2B e-cigarette market, though exact figures are difficult to track (Herzog et al., 2014a, Herzog et al., 2014b). Another study examining tobacco and e-cigarette online banner/video advertisements in the USA and Canada found that an estimated $2 million was spent by the industry between 2012 and 2013 on the web (Richardson et al., 2015).

As e-cigarette sales have increased, so have calls for Federal regulation of this new nicotine delivery technology. In April, 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed regulations that for the first time would govern the use, sale, marketing, and manufacturing of e-cigarettes, and will likely establish a minimum purchasing age, require product package warnings, and set product standards once promulgated (Cobb et al., 2015, Deeming Tobacco Products, 2014). Importantly, the proposed regulations do not specifically regulate or prohibit online e-cigarette sales, though their general requirements could interpreted as applicable to online vendors (“Deeming Tobacco Products To Be Subject to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act,” 2014). Hence, given the growth of the e-cigarette market and ubiquitous access online, a more detailed assessment of the e-cigarette e-commerce marketplace is critical to inform interpretation of FDA regulations as well as in guiding future regulatory science.

To date, a handful of studies have attempted to describe e-cigarette Internet vendors and their online marketing by focusing on: the number of product brands; presence of flavors, nicotine strengths and ingredients; product claims; representation of health claims; volume and topic areas/themes of online marketing; assessing characteristics of online banner/video advertisement; and examining the relationships between affiliate networks and Internet vendors (Cobb et al., 2015, Grana and Ling, 2014, Richardson et al., 2015, Zhu et al., 2014). Expanding on this research, this study describes additional e-cigarette Internet vendor characteristics not previously explored, including vendor geographic locations, use of online sales promotion strategies, use of social networking platforms for marketing, and reexamining age verification processes in order to further inform future policy making on this issue.

Section snippets

Structured web searches and vendor identification

The first phase of this study involved conducting structured Internet search engine queries using the five most popular e-cigarette-related key search terms “e cig”, “e cigarette”, “ecig”, “vape” and “vaping” based on results from Google Trends on search term interest over the past 12 months. We then used Google search engine to query these popular e-cigarette-related search terms based upon Google's overwhelming popularity among English-speaking Internet users and its large volume of global

Results

Applying our search query strategy yielded a total of 246 website links for review. Websites featuring news articles (e.g., Reuters), reference sites (e.g., Wikipedia) or that constituted health or information-only sites (e.g., WebMD, FDA website) were excluded (n = 79), leaving 167 remaining websites for further in-depth review. An additional 110 websites were excluded due to the following criteria: duplicate sites; marketing affiliate sites not directly selling e-cigarettes but that provided a

Discussion

The aim of this study was to expand understanding of the e-cigarette Internet vendor environment in order to identify unique marketing characteristics utilized by this alternative form of access. The results of this study also inform the applicability of proposed FDA e-cigarette rules in the context of online sales, identify possible regulatory gaps, and may aid in the development of future regulatory science mechanisms to address unique challenges of online promotion and sale of e-cigarettes.

Role of funding source

Nothing declared.

Authors’ contribution

We note that with respect to author contributions, Tim K. Mackey (TM) and Angela Miner (AM) jointly conceived the study, TM, AM, and Raphael Cuomo (RC) jointly wrote the manuscript, TM, AM, and RC jointly edited the manuscript, TM, AM, and RC jointly conducted the data analyses, and TM supervised its legal and policy analysis.

Conflict of interest

Nothing declared.

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