ABSTRACT
Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is widely acknowledged as the cause of fundamental changes in organizations, industries, market structures and entire economies — changes that increasingly affect almost every aspect of every kind of business. Forced by market pressure and the necessity to build or protect competitive advantages, companies have started to invest heavily in Internet-related technologies. As requisite expertise could not be established as rapidly as businesses began to invest, and as the complexity of Internet applications is also growing rapidly, many EC ventures must be qualified as real world experiments with mission-critical implications.
