Analysing e-business models

Abstract

The business model concept is becoming increasingly popular within ebusinesses and e-business research. However, the concept is often used relatively independently from theory, meaning model components and their interrelations are relatively obscure. This paper analysis three e-business models taxonomies based on a generic business model, which include customers and competitors, the offering, activities and organisation, resources and factor market interactions. The longitudinal processes and actions by which business models evolve are also included. The result of the analysis shows that most of the e-business models only addresses customers and the offering. Other important aspects of any business, e.g. activates and resource, are not addressed. In sum, e-business models, as they appear, in literature are formal descriptions of how businesses can use the Internet to leverage their offering, without any casual relationships between components, e.g. that the offering requires some activities to be performed by the organisation in order to deliver a offering to a market. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.