Electronic business models: five cases from five industries

The term business model has been used loosely several times for describing a company’s strategies, revenue model, processes and overall business logic both by researchers and practitioners. Several authors have defined a business model concept and described the constructs of a business model. Still, only a few studies, if any, concentrate on the evaluation of business models. Hence, this paper attempts to shed more light on this issue by evaluating five electronic business models from five different industries including travelling, media, logistics, telecommunication, and manufacturing. Within electronic business model evaluation, we have emphasised the evolution and maturity of success in terms of critical success factors (CSF) and customer need factors (CNF). Results deriving from the five case studies indicate that traditional business fundamentals, such as running business at profit, abilities of personnel and long customer relationships, are essential in order to gain success in electronic business models. Furthermore, we noticed that success factors, CSFs and CNFs, are different depending of the maturity phase of an electronic business model. Finally, we argue that B2B and B2C businesses have, in fact, very similar kind of features in e-business.