Guest editorial: Experiments in e‐commerce

Abstract

Now that the dot-com bubble has burst and the Internet gold rush has subsided, we can begin to talk more sensibly about e-commerce, its promises and its pitfalls. E-commerce may have initially meant the demise of brick-and-mortar stores to prognosticators, opportunity to entrepreneurs, and challenge to retailers, but in retrospect it is clear that stores are still standing, some people made money while many lost money, and retailers executed some largely technological changes in their business practices. E-commerce's initial bold claims were belied, but beyond the early optimism that the technology would change everything immediately, there is now a calm and growing realization that e-commerce exerts a quiet influence that will take decades to realize fully. The novelty of mainstream e-commerce overshadowed the fact that e-commerce has been around for quite some time, perhaps beginning with the first business transaction conducted over the telegraph, moving on to the telephone, and finally to the computer. Banks and other financial institutions had been engaging in e-commerce in the form of electronic money transfers long before consumers and retailers got involved in the enterprise. The Internet brought e-commerce from the sole dominion of financial institutions to the world at large. As retailers and consumers began to feel their way around this new environment and the technology continued to improve, the first studies in the pragmatic dust bowl empiricist tradition appeared, but beyond some early academic efforts, the entire e-commerce enterprise was a series of experiments writ large. From thousands of business models and practices, the e-commerce environment selected a few successful ones and the others vanished. Similarly, early