Communities of commerce

In this bold new book, experts Stacey Bressler and Charles Grantham offer us our first detailed look at communities of commerce and how they are transforming the nature of competition both on and off the Internet. They explore the forces that precipitated the emergence of communities of commerce, and explain why businesses that follow this business model-including Cisco, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, iVillage, VerticalNet, Lands End, MarthaStewart.com, and other top e-shops-succeed so spectacularly where so many online businesses fail. Most importantly, they show you how a well-designed community of commerce strategy can help your company to achieve record growth and profits, while significantly cutting operating costs and minimizing risks.

Drawing on their extensive first-hand experience as well as interviews conducted with managers at several top e-businesses, Bressler and Grantham develop a rigorous business model that provides a complete blueprint for designing, developing, assessing, and managing communities of commerce. With the help of numerous case studies that vividly illustrate what works and what doesn't, they describe the range of structural, cultural, and business processes entailed in adapting the community of commerce paradigm, and they provide practical pointers on such key issues as choosing partners for utmost strategic advantage; collaborating to build brands and customer loyalty; integrating product or service development; collaborative supply chain management-, and much more.

The first guide to understanding and taking advantage of one of the primary drivers of online business today, Communities of Commerce is must reading for savvy managers who understand that in the years ahead, every business will be an e-business.