Strategies for Value Creation in E-Commerce:: Best Practice in Europe

This paper investigates strategies for value creation of e-commerce companies. Our main assumption is that e-commerce fundamentally affects the way business is conducted across many industries. To support this insight, we discuss the unique characteristics of virtual markets' brought on by the Internet. Based on a survey of 30 European e-commerce companies, we then identify two main strategies for value creation in e-commerce — the efficiency that e-commerce business models exhibit, and the degree to which they create stickiness.' To illustrate these two strategies, we give examples of European companies that can be considered `best practice' companies.