An electronic mall, in its basic form, consists of a collection of e-shops, usually enhanced by a common umbrella, for example a well-known brand may be enriched by a common granted payment method. The e-malls operators may not have an interest in an individual business that is being hosted. Instead the operator may seek benefits in enhanced sales of the supporting technologies (e.g., IBM with World Avenue). Alternatively benefits are sought in services (e.g., Barclays with BarclaysSquer), or in advertising space and/or brand reinforcement or in collective benefits for the e-shops that are hosted such as traffic, with the expectation that visiting one shop on the e-mall will lead to visits to neighboring shops.
Published in Chapter:
B2B E-Commerce Development in Syria and Sudan
Dimitris K. Kardaras (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 11
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-845-1.ch007
Abstract
There is a revolution transforming the global economy. Web technology is transforming all business activities into information-based. The rate of technological change is so rapid that electronic commerce (eC) is already making fundamental changes in the electronic land-escape. eC over the Internet is a new way of conducting business. It has the potential to radically alter economic activities and social environment and it has already made a major impact on large sectors such as communications, finance, and retail-trade. eC has also been hailed as the promise land for small and medium sized enterprises. Therefore, it will no longer be possible, operationally or strategically, to ignore the information-based virtual value chain for any business. eC promises that smaller or larger companies as well as developed or developing countries can exploit the opportunities spawned by eC technologies and compete more effectively. The introduction of the Internet for commercial use in 1991 had created the first real opportunity for electronic markets. It offered a truly global publicly available computer network infrastructure with easy and inexpensive access. After nearly three decades of notfor- profit operations, the network was transformed into a worldwide digital market place practically overnight. This shift from physical market place to a digital one had contributed a great deal to cost reductions, speeding up communication, and provision of users with more timely information (Shaw, Gardner, & Thomas, 1997; Timmers, 1999).