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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. And there is more. The merce department’s figures include the fees earned 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。 it is also the way the makes it easy for them to be fickle. If they do not like a website, they swiftly move on. “The web is the most selfish environment in the world,” says Daniel Rosensweig, chief operating officer of Yahoo! “People want to use the inter whenever they want, how they want and for whatever they want.” Yahoo! is not alone in defining its strategy as working out what its customers (260m unique users every month) are looking for, and then trying to give it to them. The first thing they want is to bee better informed about products and prices. “We operate our business on that belief,” says Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. Amazon became famous for books, but long ago branched out into selling lots of other things too。 another, concern about fraud, which poses the biggest threat to online trade. But as long as the inter continues to deliver price and product information quickly, cheaply and securely, emerce will continue to grow. Increasingly, panies will have to assume that customers will know exactly where to look for the best buy. This market has the potential to bee as perfect as it gets.