The Internet commerce arena has become a very complex world. Millions of sites wait for visitors offering a vast number of products, services and information. The dynamic and flexible nature of the medium as well as its ubiquitous reach have leveraged a great variety of business activities. New intermediaries have appeared in the virtual value chains and new types of business, e.g. the virtual organizations, have arisen as a result of the innovative business models that emerged at the early dawn of the net economy era. Banks and financial institutions, in general, have established an Internet presence with various objectives.
Some banks are there because their competitors have been.
Very few, however, have set a strategy for exploiting the opportunities offered by Internet. To do this, they need some sort of e-business activities chart, showing the structure of the Internet market in order to decide which business is relevant to theirs and where to invest on. Moreover, decision-makers would like to know what are the Internet business activities in which other banks have been engaged in. This is exactly the purpose of this paper. To provide a concise, comprehensive way of modeling the Internet commerce market, because its business activities have not been systematically chartered, and, second, identify the role of banks in the Internet commerce world.