Are You Out of Your Depth with E-Commerce?

Why is Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) not the runaway success it was supposed to be? Instead of hearing or reading about wonderful achievements we appear to be finding an increasing number of stories ranging from disappointment to despair. In this paper it will be argued that the term e-commerce means too many things to too many different people, and it will be shown that a number of variants of e-commerce models can be defined to help clarify which style of e-commerce is being discussed. Restricting the discussion to the commonly discussed business to consumer (B2C) model, it will be shown that while the "classic" model of e-commerce is appropriate for many businesses, it is equally inappropriate or unaffordable for many more businesses, especially those in the small and medium end of the business sector. The paper introduces a new view of B2C ecommerce as an immersion model with a number of distinct layers of sophistication, based on matching business functionality with technological implementation.