Affärsmodeller inom E-commerce : – Hur lyckas man som småföretagare på Internet

Sammanfattning: To start a company on the Internet is something that has appealed a lot of people during the last couple of years. Some of the companies have succeeded in their struggle but a lot of companies have failed to live out their ambition. This paper deals with the concept of e-commerce and aims to study whether or not the companies that has succeeded has made use of business models and what other factors that is important that you wont find in any written theory. The paper also aims to study the concept of business models and what a business model consists of. To be able to do this research we have interviewed three different companies that are all active in e-commerce and have survived for at least three years. Two of the companies are classical web shops that sell products to their customers and the last one is a site with articles about hardware and IT business in general. The company that provides articles receives their incomes from advertising sales. The results from these research has been compared to what the theory says to see if the theoretical business models is being used and to see if there are other factors that has impacted the success of the company. In the result of the thesis it shows that there are factors where the studied companies have followed the theoretical approaches. But there are also other factors that are important to consider. In the theory part of the thesis the authors put together a research model based on other authors theories on what a small internet based company should think of. With the research model as a base the founders of three small internet based companies were interviewed. From these interviews the authors discovered that there are other important factors that the theory did not bring up. One of those factors is personal engagement which is strongly linked with the personal freedom that you get from running your own Internet based company. Other essential factors that were found are the development of distributor contacts and having a good customer focus.