An excellent example of an
e-commerce business model would be a publishing company. In the past,
when a book is published it is stored in a warehouse; from the
warehouse it goes to a distributor, who sends it to a wholesaler,
which in turn sells the product to a book store. This is both a costly
and time consuming method of introducing a product to the consumer.
E-commerce has completely
revolutionized this process. The same publisher doing business on the
Internet can cut out the distributor, wholesaler, and the book store all
together. These would be replaced by a web site in which consumers can
order the books directly from the publisher. Then the publisher can ship
the product directly from the warehouse to the consumer. In this
example, the warehouse is also a distributor, whereas the web site
replaces both the wholesaler and the "brick and mortar" book store.
Marketing the product in this manner saves both the company and the
consumer a great deal of money.
