Biggies like Amazon, e Bay, Yahoo are all celebrating their 10th. Google is even younger then 10. In their brief history most online businesses found profits harder to come by than publicity and many early stars crumbled to dust. Amazon's losses reached in 2000 $1.4bn , showing in the balance a negative equity at that time, and turned only in 2003 to profits. Now quarterly results from e Bay, Yahoo and Google show a strong growth of profits, but if you believe they can rest you are wrong. Knowing this each of them is growing beyond their original businesses. Amazon earlier selling everything on fixed prices is now hosting auctions, E Bay's income earlier purely from auctions is now coming to 30% from goods at fixed prices, Yahoo is continuously changing its business model while Google gets more into the the market of e Bay. All successful online sites had to reinvent themselves continually and only those could survive who are able to move on.
Most online successes began with a couple of geeks in a garage but were then taken over by professional managers. One exception is Amazon whose founder is still at the helm. But actually he managed before a big bookstore and was not new to the field of management.
The internet opened up high creativity in the design of business models .There is one basic difference between off and online. While offline focuses on products, services and volume in e commerce most value is created by business ways in which firms conduct their affairs focused on suppliers, partners and customers rather than on products and services themselves. That may be the reason that online businesses have not replaced as many off line firms as predicted.
Two features of online have been very helpful in creating value. The enormous number of different products and services that can be offered online and the extend to which online communities help each other freely.
What will drive the next round of e commerce development. Here especially two new technologies are throwing up opportunities. These include mobile access to internet and RFID tags newly invented in a extremely affordable way , which enable the non stop monitoring of the movements of goods.
Be ready to see a further strong growth of e commerce..