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1 中文 2915 字 Introduction to ECommerce Efraim Turban, David King 1 A perfect market Emerce is ing of age, says Paul Markillie, but not in the way predicted in the bubble years. WHEN the technology bubble burst in 2021, the crazy valuations for online panies vanished with it, and many businesses folded. The survivors plugged on as best they could, encouraged by the growing number of inter users. Now valuations are rising again and some of the dots are making real profits, but the business world has bee much more cautious about the inter’s potential. The funny thing is that the wild predictions made at the height of the boom—namely, that vast chunks of the world economy would move into cyberspace—are, in one way or another, ing true. The raw numbers tell only part of the story. According to America’s Department of Commerce, online retail sales in the world’s biggest market last year rose by 26%, to $55 billion. That sounds a lot of money, but it amounts to only % of total retail sales. The vast majority of people still buy most things in the good old “bricksandmortar” world. But the merce department’s figures deal with only part of the retail industry. For instance, they exclude online travel services, one of the most successful and fastestgrowing sectors of emerce. InterActiveCorp (IAC), the owner of and , alone sold $10 billionworth of travel last year—and it has plenty of petition, not least from airlines, hotels and carrental panies, all of which increasingly sell online. Nor do the figures take in things like financial services, ticketsales agencies, pornography (a $2 billion business in America last year, according to Adult Video News, a trade magazine), online dating and a host of other activities, from tracing ancestors to gambling (worth perhaps $6 billion worldwide). They also leave out purchases in grey markets, such as the online pharmacies that are thought to be responsible for a good proportion of the $700m that Americans spent last year on buying cutprice prescription drugs from across the border in Canada. 2 Tip of the iceberg And there is more. The merce department’s figures include the fees earned 2 by inter auction sites, but not the value of goods that are sold: an astonishing $24 billionworth of trade was done last year on eBay, the biggest online auctioneer. Nor, by definition, do they include the billions of dollarsworth of goods bought and sold by businesses connecting to each other over the inter. Some of these B2B services are proprietary。 for example, WalMart tells its suppliers that they must use its own system if they want to be part of its annual turnover of