6. Opportunities and Challenges. What opportunities do e-businesses offer? What challenges do they create? How would your business model change if you decided to run it as a traditional business rather than as an e-business? E-Business Opportunities: There are more variations on each theme than you could possibly imagine, but the majority of e-business opportunities fall into one of five categories.
1.Selling goods online:
E-commerce, or electronic commerce, is one subset of e-business. It involves buying and selling hard goods, electronic goods or services over the Internet. What comes to mind when people think about doing business on the Internet is good, old-fashioned trade. Selling goods online is probably the simplest way you can start an e-business. Depending on your business plan, you can put up an online store for a very small investment or you can spend millions.
2. Service Companies:
The Internet can be used for a lot more than just selling products. Companies are now moving toward service-oriented models, using the Internet as a delivery vehicle to provide services to consumers and to other businesses including many services that weren't possible before the Internet revolution and the technology accompanying it. There are a variety of services that can be offered using the Internet as a conduit. You can offer online data backup, be an ASP or provide a unified online message center. ISPs fall into the category of e-commerce services as well.
3. Distance learning: In the old days, when a company wanted to train its employees, it had to send them to an off-site location, pay for accommodations, and lose a day or two of productivity for each employee. Now it's possible for employees to get training on demand, right at the desktop, delivered via the Internet. Becoming a part of this training delivery vehicle can be lucrative.
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