Many new and exciting business and purchasing opportunities are becoming available due to the phenomenal growth of the Internet and peoples interest to save time and money by purchasing goods via the web. If you think about all the companies that you know that don’t use computers for their everyday business than you either are stumped or just thought of one that will soon be forced to evolve or will soon go out of business. There are very few successful companies that do not use computers in their everyday business activities. There are also few companies do not use some form of e-commerce. Just as an example to hit home this point, the effect of the Internet is so widespread in today’s business communities, one online article stated that more than 100000 companies have Internet addresses, and 20000 companies have home pages on the Internet as of February 1999. (DataQuest, 1999). Since the beginning of the 1990’s these numbers have quadrupled. Now you might be thinking, “Just what exactly is e-commerce?” To most casual Internet surfers, e-commerce means online shopping or simply purchasing Christmas presents via your personal computer and any Internet browser. As we will soon find out this is not exactly the definition of e-commerce but rather on entity of its capabilities. In Layman’s terms, e-commerce is the exchange of business information between two or more organizations. An example of this would be buying and selling products or services over the Internet. After e-commerce proved to be an efficient means to conduct long distance transactions it became very accepted. This paper shall discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of e-commerce, as well as predicting its potential for the future of business. Electronic commerce, or e-commerce has developed exponentially in the last few years and has left some in the cold. The majority of people think e-commerce is just about buying and sel...
