This Focus theme section of Electronic Markets on Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) focuses on the critical aspect of customers in ecommerce. Commerce in electronic markets (eCommerce) remains a significant, pervasive phenomenon for enterprises, customers, governments and consumer advocacy watchdogs. Three important relationships in electronic markets include: between enterprises and customers (B2C); among enterprises (B2B); and among customers (C2C). Additional relationships between governments (G2G), enterprises (G2B) and customers (G2C) become more important as electronic markets and eGovernment mature and legislation, regulation and oversight increase. Fundamentally eCRM (from the customer’s perspective) concerns attracting and keeping “Economically Valuable” customers and repelling and eliminating “Economically Invaluable” ones. Electronic markets are evolving from “first order” transactional value exchanges through “second-order” informational value exchanges into “third-order” relational value exchanges. These relational value exchanges are central to success and competitive advantage for firms and customers that engage in eCommerce. This focus theme addresses those value exchanges between customers and enterprises. The concept of CRM in the Information Systems (IS) Discipline can be traced back to early ideas that customers should be considered as assets, sources of value and resources to be managed across a lifecycle (Ives and Learmonth 1984; Ives and Mason 1990.) More specifically Ives and Learmonth proposed the IS Customer Resource Life Cycle and later Ives and Mason (Ives and Mason 1990) explained how IS can revitalize customer service. However these early forays into “CRM” were not followed in the literature by any substantial set of published articles, let alone by practice in the IS field. Such visionary articles often precede mainstream research and practice. This is not to say that there were not articles on CRM published in other disciplines, particularly Marketing, before or contemporaneously with these two foundational IS articles, but rather that these were the first we found in an extensive literature review of IS-CRM (Romano and Fjermestad 2001–2002). In our introspective study of IS-CRM (Romano and Fjermestad 2001–2002) we made six recommendations that would indicate maturation of CRM as an MIS subfield of study as follows: One, development of empirically testable CRM theories; Two, conducting of lab and field experiments to test hypotheses based on theory; Three, development and use of valid instruments; Four, development of a cumulative tradition of research and replication, extension of theories, models, and instruments, and development of standard constructs and metrics; Five, additional publication of ISCRM research in top MIS journals; and Six, development of new classification schemes for rapidly changing terminology. In this Focus Theme section although there are only two articles, both contribute to the maturity of CRM in IS research. The first paper develops and tests two “contingency” hypotheses with Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA). The authors also rigorously validated their instrument. This article is a clear example of the maturation of the research questions, theory development, Electron Markets (2009) 19:69–70 DOI 10.1007/s12525-009-0010-6