The Blossoming of eCommerce

by Mark Wheeler, Technology & Business Magazine

After a shaky past, Australian businesses are driving great value from electronic business. Mark Wheeler learns how a fresh approach is sometimes all it takes.

The return of ecommerce to the forefront of the business agenda has been gathering momentum now for some time. Over the past 10 years, ecommerce (like many other technologies) has entered our consciousness amid much hype and has been over-enthusiastically pursued. Soon after came disillusionment and businesses moved their attention elsewhere, but now ecommerce (and more broadly e-business) appears to be undergoing a steady but far more realistic rise. Organisations have again begun to put faith back into electronically based business but with a more appropriated and considered approach.

Way back in the early and mid ’90s, the booming IT business was matched in the wider business world by an eagerness— almost urgency—to establish a presence on the Web. If you didn’t have a Web site you didn’t really exist, so Web sites began to pop up like daisies in the springtime. Like many things it coincided generally with the rise of the Internet, the mainstream uptake of computers and home computing, and became known as the dot-com era.

With the slackening off of all things dot-com, ecommerce activity went through a period of relative unpopularity and by 2001 wariness of failure saw business investment in ecommerce dwindle. It’s what analyst firm Gartner called the “Ecommerce Hype Cycle Timeline”. Gartner’s analysis places the year 2000 at the “peak of inflated expectations” and the period between 2001 and 2004 as the “trough of disillusionment”. Dramatic terminology, yes, but it does explain what the mood was like.

Martin North, general manager at Fujitsu Consulting, gets very excited when he talks ecommerce these days. But looking back on these early phases he says: “A lot of Internet business failed to deliver the value to organisations. I recall talking to several CEOs around 2001 who felt they were hoodwinked. They felt that this would be a whole new way of doing business but got no value out of it. There was a wave of skepticism, and a feeling that it was a waste of time, effort and money. All this hype was there, and it was nothing but hype.”

“The dishonesty of a lot of the e-business hype over the past couple of years has been that it [hype] pushed that one size fits all,” says Bruce Arnold, director of Australian Internet analyst and consulting firm Caslon.

“Not all businesses are the same—some are big, some are small, some have different relationships with their customers and some have a quite different competitive environment.” Figuring out what works for each individual business and how ebusiness actually mightbenefit your organisation represents the great challenge in years to come, but also serves to explain how it might have failed in the past. It really goes beyond just having a Web site, instead moving towards the discovery of how your businesses processes, interactions, services and function can be improved through an ecommerce strategy.

Arnold points out that the smart businesses will be those who work out what is appropriate for their business. In some cases all the Web site will need to be is a splash page—a business card giving details of how and when to get in contact. At the other extreme—and getting equal value for money—are people who will have restructured their business because being online is a crucial part of the service or function they offer.