E-commerce as a Revenue Stream

for editorial web sites

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History of E-commerce

E-commerce Models

Editorial Site Significance

Industry Impact

Effect on Visual Presentation

E-commerce User Experience

New Businesses Spawned

Conclusion

Types of businesses e-commerce has spawned

E-commerce has created a niche for a few new types of online companies. Commerce One, OrderTrust.com, and PurchasePro, Inc. all fall into a class of companies that sell to the people who sell on the Web.

Commerce One Inc. is a business-to-business e-commerce software provider. Commerce One has over 3,500 employees worldwide. Clients include Boise Cascade, Cisco Systems, Compaq, CompUSA, Grainger, and General Motors.

"Being a marketplace services company, we exist all over the system," said Chris Marti, a senior manager at Commerce One. "We want to touch as many transactions along the product life cycle." The firm's products can interface the B2B e-commerce chain at the design process, help with planning and forecasting production runs, and even assist in inventory management.

OrderTrust.com provides integrated order-management services for e-commerce and operates an order-processing network. It has a network of partnerships that ensure that the item selected by a consumer by clicking on his or her mouse arrives, in good condition, and is billed properly.

"OrderTrust would be a very complimentary service," said Marti. "They're in a business of physically handling things. They want to be an outsource and have big warehouses, like what Amazon does without the Web site."

Purchase Pro, Inc. is a B2B e-commerce company that operates electronic marketplaces designed to connect buyers and sellers over the Internet. In April it announced an extension of its partnership with AOL Time Warner signing 10 new agreements for clients to sign onto a free meeting place on the Internet for owners of small businesses called the Netscape Netbusiness marketplace.

Calico Technology, Inc. and others will sell companies do-it-yourself order-processing software for e-commerce.

ReturnBuy.com is one of a handful of companies that takes back merchandise purchased elsewhere to resell it or dispose of it. They will promptly credit a customer's account.

Which companies are the big non-editorial e-commerce players?*

*Based on Media Metrix March 2001 overall ranking of digital sites