ABSTRACT
As a modern way to conduct business in the global economic environment, e-commerce is becoming an essential component integrated with traditional business processes in enterprises. In order to reduce risks and increase profits in e-commerce investments and provide the best services to their customers, enterprises have to find appropriate approaches to analyse their e-commerce strategies at business planning stage. Strategic management tools are designed for enterprises to evaluate their business strategies and they can be used to evaluate the e-commerce business plan as well. For example, the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is regarded as a popular way to evaluate an e-commerce business plan, with business environmental scanning based on internal environmental factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external environmental factors (opportunities and threats) (Turban et al. 2003). In order to facilitate the application of the strategic management tools, different forms of applications are adopted, such as checklist (OGC 2004), rating system (UNMFS 2004), and expert system (PlanWare 2004), etc. Among these strategic management tools, computer-driven business simulation tools enable participants to run virtual business processes, experiment with different strategies, and compete with other companies or plans in a virtual business environment. As an example, the Marketplace (ILS 2003; IDC 2004) is a business simulator for integrative business courses, which provides decision-making content on marketing, product development, sales force management, financial analysis, accounting, manufacturing, and quality management. Regarding the application of computer simulation in e-commerce, the Marketplace strategic e-commerce simulation is designed specifically for e-commerce courses, and it illustrates the business concepts of the e-commerce environment (ILS 2003). For an e-commerce system simulation, Griss and Letsinger (2000) conducted research on flexible, agent-based e-commerce systems with an experimental multi-player shopping game, in which agents represent buyers, sellers, brokers, and services of various kinds, for demonstration and educational value, for experimenting with alternative individual and group economic strategies, and for evaluating the effectiveness of agent-based systems for e-commerce. Both academic 110and professional practice have proved that using computer-driven simulation is an effective, efficient, and economical way for e-commerce business plan evaluation.
