Recently, Kenneth H. Slade, Hale and Dorr LLP presented a talk which is discussed about the current state of e-commerce in the United States. In his talk he started to discuss the unduly large number of online users in the United States and Canada. From his talk, we had known that the e-commerce success stories were reviewed that include amazon.com, which is an online book, CD and video retailer, e-bay, which operates an online person-to-person exchange in an auction format, permitting trading of personal items, E-trade, which provides on-line investing service and Cisco System, which sells Internet routers, network switches and software which provides base-online order tracking and routing functionality.

There have, of course, been failures. IBM’s World Avenue Mall was probably launched too early, before online usage become sufficiently popular to justify IBM’s investment in that project. Merchants participating in the World Avenue Mall also complained that IBM did not adequately promote the project. IBM claims it learned another valuable lesson from the project—that IBM’s name alone is not sufficient to bring enough customers traffic to the site to make it success. MCI’s 1800 Music Now, which permitted both telephone and online ordering of CD’s, shut down in December 1996, only year after it was launched. That failure was attributed in the force down to a variety of factors, including:

1. Weakness in the music industry that year, leading to deep discounting by retailer.

2. The site was not easy to use and that time consumer look like more prefer the traditional way for ordering product which is the way touch and see the product.

3. Compared once again to traditional stores, its prices were relatively high.