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The recent proliferation of e-commerce has led to a great deal of analysis probing the who, what, where, when, and why’s of new opportunities for conducting business online. In this publication alone, articles have ranged from theoretical predictions of the economic forces that will mold the Internet market (see [1]) to invasion-of-privacy issues reflected in empirical analysis of online consumer preferences (see [5]). Cookies, clickstream data trails, and the ease of conducting online surveys have permitted unprecedented tracking of what consumers search for, click on, and ultimately buy. Aggregating that data results in an entrepreneur’s dream for extracting significant characterizations of the Internet consumer population. The consumer-side research has already repeatedly stated that existing risks in e-commerce pose substantial barriers to consumer participation online. Never before has our understanding of the consumer been both so intimate and so extensive. However, the firm side of e-commerce has comparatively been forgotten. Amazon.com, which operates primarily on a business-to-consumer level, is now the cliché shorthand for describing what the firm side of the online market is all about. Yet in many ways, Amazon.com is an extremely misleading representative of e-business: it is the exception, rather than the rule, for online commerce. The only characteristic it shares with the majority of firms Firm Trust Detlef Schoder and Pai-Ling Yin