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Ming-te Lu: Chair Professor and Head of Department, Department of Computer Studies, Lingnan College, Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]
Wing-lok Yeung: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Studies, Lingnan College, Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
The Internet has been hailed as the dawn of a new era of global communication (Microsoft Corporation, 1996). In fact, Microsoft regards it as a technical revolution at least as important as the popularization of the personal computer. The Internet originated in 1969 as a special communication tool among selected academic and governmental researchers. In the early years, e-mail, file transfers, and listservs were the major Internet applications; in the last few years, owing to the introduction of user-friendly browsers, World Wide Web (WWW) applications, or simply Web applications, have been increasing in an exponential fashion and have become the driving force behind the expansion of the Internet user base. Today, as many as 71 million people (including 14 million usinge-mail only) are said to have access to the Internet (Fox, 1997).
With its expanding user base, the Internet has been recognized as a technology which can make a significant contribution to components of a company's value chain (Cronin, 1995,pp. 56-62), for it can improve a company's relationships with vendors and suppliers, internal operations, and customer relations. Many businesses are using the Internet as a new information exchange channel to transact business (Maney et al., 1996); at the retail level, these activities have been called digital retail, e-shopping, e-tailing, cybershopping, or virtual retail sites (Margolis, 1996). In this paper, the totality of these activities will be referred to as Internet commerce. According to INPUT, an electronic commerce consulting firm, electronic marketing will generate US$230 billion of sales by the year 2000 (Information Management, 1996). Among the various media in the electronic marketplace, Internet commerce will account for more than 50 percent of predicted sales.
Owing to its enormous market potential, many academics and businesses are closely studying and monitoring the explosive growth in this marketplace. Since the WWW has become the major instrument of Internet commerce, studies on the WWW as a new information exchange channel (Maney et al., 1996)have been conducted to gain more insights into how organizations are using Web sites to carry out various activities in Internet commerce. However,...