The key to success in e-commerce will be competitive advantage generated by using electronic means as a platform to leverage knowledge and awareness, online. Added value, especially in the business-to- business (B2B) environment is being gained through extranets, a low-cost solution for linking databases, and through collaborative networks. Information services can be clustered and shared between partners, and products bundled and linked for the retail or business customer.
Moore's Law states that computing power doubles and the cost halves every 18 months. Gilder's Law notes that total bandwidth triples every 12 months. It is also estimated that the utility of a network is exponential to the number of nodes in the network or, in plain English, the bigger the network the better; the more customers you get the more they add value to each other. Amazon.com is perhaps a classic example of this.
THE KEY OF SUCCESS IN ECOMMERCE
In the twentieth century, the world was focused on producing atoms, that is, tangible solid products, while in the twenty-first century the focus is on bits and bytes. In other words, value is in information and knowledge, not in production. This will have a profound effect on marketers. There will be core changes in how we view strategy, . Alan Mitchell in Marketing Business said: "To say the marketing department is responsible for marketing is like saying love is the respon- sibility of one family member."