E-Commerce Is Important To Your Business

Why is E-Commerce Important to Me?

Here are a few short items to remind you of why the Internet is so important to business today. If you are in the business of marketing to the public, or to other businesses, e-commerce is vital to your future. While the overall economy has been growing by single-digit rates in the longest economic expansion in history, electronic commerce has been growing orders of magnitude faster than the economy as a whole. A Washington Post report in January of 2003 reported that holiday shopping online had tripled. Projections for Internet commerce in the first few years of the 21st century range between hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, depending on who is doing the projection. All agree that Internet commerce will be a major part of the 21st century world economy.

Depending on your sources, there either are or soon will be over 100 million people with accounts on the World Wide Web. Between a quarter and a third of them are Internet shoppers. You can't afford to turn your back on 25-35 million potential customers and hope to succeed.

The biggest battle in corporate America today is between the telephone companies and the cable and satellite TV companies over who will provide the bulk of Internet connectivity to the home in the future. AT&T just spent billions of dollars to acquire cable TV companies in order to gain access to that high-speed wire leading into the home. If AT&T would not be willing to pay that kind of money unless they saw big returns down the line.