Business Models for E-commerce: Old Wine in New Bottles?

While e-commerce is sprouting radical changes in intra-organizational structures and inter-organizational relationships, the underlying principles turn out to be less than novel. Rather, they reflect a revival of traditional values that prevailed well before the advent of mass production. From a customer's perspective, most “new” business models in the Information Age are indeed old wine in new bottles. This is demonstrated with ten trends in e-commerce and explains why conventional rules in the old economy still apply, bursting the bubble of unrealistic valuations of numerous e-business ventures. Keywords— e-commerce, business models, digital economy, information age