A metrication and comparison framework for e-commerce systems

Abstract

“We live in an era of ’e-everything’ ” [1]. Everywhere we look, we see people trying to fuse technology with every imaginable business concept in the hope of making more money. We have seen e-commerce, e-procurement, e-logistic, e-government, and e-banking to name a few. The late 1990’s saw technology stocks on the market inflate to astronomical levels as would-be entrepreneurs wrongly reasoned that this wonderful new technology would automatically catapult them to unimaginable riches. Thousands of dot-com startups emerged in the in the early months of the new millennium, thousands of dot-com startups crashed. We know now that setting up an online venture is no guarantee of success. Business creativity and discipline also need to be applied. The business and technical aspects of an e-commerce venture will together contribute to its degree of success (or failure) and one cannot go without the other.