Several factors have critical importance in the success of any e-commerce venture.

Providing value to customers. Vendors can achieve this by offering a product or product line that attracts potential customers at a competitive price.

Providing service and performance. This can be done by offering a fast, user-friendly purchasing experience.

Providing an attractive site. This can be done by the tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white space percentage.

Providing an incentive to buy and to return. This can be done with sales promotions like coupons, special offers, and discounts. Cross-linked web sites, and advertising affiliate programs can also be used.

Providing personal attention. This can be done by personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers.

Providing a sense of community. This can be done with chat-rooms, message boards, soliciting customer input, and affinity programs.

Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.

Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer.

Owning the customer's total experience. This can be done by treating any contacts with a customer as part of a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous with the brand.

Streamlining business processes. This can be done through re-engineering and information technologies.

Letting customers help themselves. Provision of a self-serve site, easy to use without assistance, can help in this respect.

Helping customers do their job. E-tailer s can provide such help through ample comparative information and good search facilities.

Constructing a sound business model. If this key success factor had appeared in textbooks in 2000, many of the dot.coms might not have gone bust.

Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a limited number of core competencies.

Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes. Creating an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the environment.