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Essentials of MIS, 9e

Laudon & Laudon

Lecture Files by Barbara J. Ellestad

Chapter 9 E-Commerce: Digital Markets, Digital Goods

Twenty-four/seven—the mantra of the Internet. Whether it’s buying, selling, gathering information, managing, or communicating, the driving force behind the evolutionary and revolutionary business is the Internet and its technological advances.

9.1 E-commerce and the Internet

Take a moment and reflect back on your shopping experiences over the last year. Did any of them not involve using the Internet in one way or another? Perhaps you simply used the Internet to research the cost of products without actually purchasing a product or service online. Perhaps you emailed a company to get an answer to a question you had about a product after you purchased it at a regular brick-and-mortar store. Or, maybe you compared prices between two businesses to get the best deal. If you did any of these you are among the growing legions that rely on the Internet as a new way of conducting business and commerce.

E-Commerce Today

The text provides useful statistics to demonstrate the solid growth in e-commerce. Many companies that failed during the “dot.com” bust did so because they didn’t have solid business plans, not because e-commerce as a whole wasn’t a good idea.

The Internet has proved to be the perfect vehicle for e-commerce because of its open standards and structure. No other methodology or technology has proven to work as well as the Internet for distributing information and bringing people together. It’s cheap and relatively easy to use it as a conduit for connecting customers, suppliers, and employees of a firm. No other mechanism has been created that allow organizations to reach out to anyone and everyone like the Internet.

The Internet allows big businesses to act like small ones and small

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