Business Models for Electronic Markets

sive development in electronic commerce. The reasons for that are, of course, the Internet and the World Wide Web, which are making electronic commerce much more accessible. They offer easily usable and low cost forms of electronic commerce. Electronic commerce on the basis of the Internet is set to become a very important way of doing business. Forrester (1997) forecasts that businessto-business (B-to-B) electronic commerce will grow to $327 billion in the year 2002 — that is the value of goods and services traded via the Internet. This excludes the value of the hardware, software and services that are needed to perform electronic commerce, whose value is estimated at several hundred billions of dollars likewise. Between 1996 and 1997 electronic commerce has been growing at over 1000 percent per year. While such high growth rates will not be sustained, it is clear that electronic commerce will become pervasive: Datamonitor (1997) expects in 5 years time 630,000 US companies and 245,000 European companies to be involved in fullfledged integrated B-to-B electronic commerce. The Report on Electronic Commerce (1998) expects that the business-to-business penetration rate will grow from 10% in 1997 to 90% in 2001.