In my presentation yesterday, I covered how the structuring of an e-business needs to differ from that of a traditional brick and mortar business in today’s economy.  In this post, I would like to touch upon in a little more detail the fierce business environment and the problems it presents e-businesses (specifically retail businesses).  First of all, the internet removes the constraints placed on traditional businesses that need to build a distribution network with a physical presence in several places in order to remain competitive.  This means that start up operations can easily enter the marketplace without having to build the infrastructure that burdens traditional businesses.  Additionally, this lack of a physical presence means that their is less marketing occurring, requiring an e-business to promote its business even more than a traditional business might have to due to its physical presence and availability to the public eye. 

Additionally, the greatness of the internet is that your product can be made available to virtually anyone through a web site.  At the same time however, this is a problem for e-businesses when potential competitors can view your website and learn greatly about your operations.  While accessibility is great, it is difficult to make your business publicly accessible and remove this threat.  Furthermore, the continuous accessibility of the web requires 24 hour service to maintain the web structure of your e-business.  If this is not possible, an event that incapacitates your site leads to the customer simply finding another e-business, and considering the fact that these are much easier to establish than traditional businesses, there are often several other options that are available to the customer.