eBusiness and eCommerce - The Driving Force Behind Today's Economy eCommerce - The global marketplace called Internet Internet opportunities grow with the number of Internet users. The world-wide-web is globally pervasive. Internet has attracted more users in more countries than any other communication tool. Even though it most concentrated in US and Europe, most growth over the next three to five years is expected to take place in Asia and Latin America. Website Advantages Cost
Compare the cost of a small ad in a magazine or how much you could spend for printing and mailing catalogs to a website on the internet. Access
With magazines, catalogues and any other ad media, you are limited to a specific geographic area, people all over the world can have access to the info that you put on-line (any info.). Websites can carry a much larger amount of info. Marketability

• Visually show your products
• Customers, partners can access your info. immediately
• Provide up-to-date information about your business
• Interactivity – get your customers’ feedback immediately, customers are able to browse, find and shop, as well as communicate any concerns, complains or questions

Things that you can do from your web site:

• Post photos of your products
• Publish monthly newsletter
• Sell online
• Have people e-mail you
• Obtain info. about your on-line visitors

Tips for creating a successful website Designing your page:

• Rule of thumb: 80% education and 20% marketing
• Make it intuitive, simple to navigate
• Give each page a short, unique, descriptive title
• Use bulleted lists to make it easy to catch the key points and benefits

Promoting your page: 1. Submit your site to search engines:

• Alta Vista
• AllTheWeb
• Excite
• Google Search
• Hot Bot
• Infoseek
• Lycos
• Open Directory Project
• Yahoo

2. Trade reciprocal links with other sites
Trading reciprocal links means that you approach other sites asking them to place a link to you in their site in exchange for a link in your site. Naturally you would want to approach busy sites that attract visitors with similar interests to your own. One good way to find such sites would be to go to a search engine and type in one of your keywords. The sites that appear at the top of the search results page would be good prospects. 3. Swap or buy banner advertisements on other sites
As opposed to text links (#3, above), banner ads deliver short-term bursts of visitors to your site. That can be expensive, but there are services that swap banner space on your site in exchange for displaying your banners on other sites. Swapped banners usually generate less-qualified traffic than targeted banner ads, but they cost much less. Some say that the Internet is as important to the marketplace as the printing press or electricity. Others say that it increases efficiency, but is not revolutionary. At the time electricity was invented, people spoke of it in terms relevant to the era such as horsepower or Candles. Today everybody agrees that electricity revolutionized economic activity, and not only that but human life in general. All I want to point out is that by the end of 2005 more than two billion human beings will be linked by networked systems of mobile communications devices. Internet is contagious! Humans will talk. Humans will exchange messages. …A slow-down of Internet usage might be observed in US, Europe and Japan due to saturation. The majority of future opportunities though will be created in the developing countries, or will be targeted to audiences there.