Essay, Research Paper: Risk In E-Commerce

BusinessWeek Online June 2001 cover the problem with most dot-com is that they play it way too safe. Dose Everyone really knows why all those dot-com crashed and burned? The real truth is, they weren’t taking risk enough. Now that the downturn has scraped the veneer of cool off every e-business form Yahoo! To Amazon.com, they are borrowing old business models that worked on television and in the mall. To succeed on the Net they need to take a risk in this nutty New World. Yahoo does a great job of aggregating information, but its business model so far has been selling ads to the masses it’s hardly an innovative idea. Another problem now is that few investors want to hear any crazy talk. Since the crash of dot-com many venture capitalists, which are supposed to take risks, are shying away form funding any e-commerce company that looks the least bit risky. Currently Amazon is cutting costs in hopes of earning an operating profit by yearend, still hasn’t stopped innovating. It keeps releasing new features such as an honor-payment system so customer can volunteer a few bucks to keep other sites they like in business. A lot of folks think it’s nonsense, but personally I think it’s a great idea. There’s a lot of opportunity for more creative ideas on the internet, Entrepreneurs and investors just need to find that backbone under the shirts they lost.


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