(Speakers Note from APEC 2000: “Economic Opportunities”)
Before you rush out there and start putting out an electronic shopping cat, or a website for the sake of a website, you need to better understand the medium you are dealing with and why you need to be doing anything about it at all. If you are a neighborhood shop with very faithful customers who prefer coming to talk to you and shop, do you really need a website and do E-commerce?
If you decide you want to adopt E-commerce, well let me quite provocative today in a session on E-commerce and tell you that rather than embark on Ecommerce, you should embark on E-business!
To understand this notion of e-business, it may be good to go back to the fundamentals of this new medium we are dealing with. What is different about Ecommerce today, after all we have been conducting business using fax, telephone, video conference, EDI networks. What is so “e’ about ecommerce? Well, it is the Internet!