Electronic Business and Marketing

摘要

Internet entrepreneurs are dramatically changing the business environment since the late 1990s by revolutionizing how business processes and transactions are conducted all over the world and as a consequence of this, business networking revenues are increasing exponentially and the number of products/services available online for businesses and consumers are also growing steadily (Colomo-Palacios, Soto-Acosta, Ramayah, & Russ, 2013). The internet and especially the recent developments with regard to social media have opened new possibilities for companies and users alike, owing to more direct and user induced participation (Wirtz, Nitzsche & Ullrich, 2014). As a consequence of the generalization of the internet, organizations are increasingly using Electronic Business applications such as electronic auctions, electronic catalogues, and customerrelationship management applications to streamline their business processes along the entire supply chain (Bakker et al., 2008). The future of the Internet and eBusiness areas has been analysed by many researchers both from ageneral perspective (e.g. Kollmann & Krell, 2011) or applied to specific scenarios like SMEs (e.g. Chong et al., 2014; Jahanshahi, Zhang, & Brem, 2013; Ovaskainen & Tinnila, 2011), government (Arendsen et al., 2014; Morgeson & Mithas, 2009), NGOs (Al-Qirim, 2007; Tchouakeu et al., 2011) or, for instance, banks (Callaway, 2011; Gikandi & Bloor, 2010; Rehman, 2012) citing just one of the most relevant cases.