Electronic commerce has been developing at a rapid pace in the past few years resulting in some great success stories. In some respects, these successes have created both an aura and impression for many that achieving such success is common and perhaps even easy to accomplish. Investors with this mindset, in turn, became enthusiastic supporters for companies that were willing to take the challenges offered by these new information and communication technologies. Thus, we have witnessed a real "eboom" in the past few years. However, we have also seen a dramatic down-turn for those companies that have not been able to realize the expectations of the investors. It seems obvious now in hindsight that in many situations, the expectations for e-business initiatives, both for dot. coms and e-channels of traditional companies, were far too optimistic. In fact, a large percentage of these initiatives were not well designed and implemented. Consequently, problems occurred, for example, in customer services, deliveries, returns, as well as logistics in general. Huge money was also often spent in building a brand image and marketing activities to complement the web-services themselves. What seems clear today is that e-business initiatives require a solid business model that helps focus and direct tactical and operational efforts. With an explicitly defined business model, it becomes possible to distinguish the basic choices for product development, marketing, ordering, logistics, financing and payment solutions that either carry the ebusiness initiative to success or helps further refine the system. In our opinion, it is clear that a definitive single "all encompassing e-business model" does not exist. Rather there is likely to be many different business models that fit into different context, economic environment, customer groups and needs, products and services. This special issue aims to focus on what kind of business models have been used, or could be used, and what has been their contribution among other factors leading to success of failure of the recent e-business experiments. The four papers for this special issue offer interesting perspectives and insights on different e-business models. The article by Lee and Brandyberry examines the e-tailers dilemma. They look at the problems e-tailers have faced in trying to obtain new customers regardless of costs. In many cases where the number of effective visitors (i. e., those who actually generate business) has increased, additional costs for servicing these customers have also increased resulting in the e- tailers facing financial trouble. This represents a situation that has occurred far too frequently in the past few years. Lee and Brandyberry have developed a model to formalize the e-tail visitor dynamics to understand the situation better. They also offer a visitor function by which it is possible to project profitability of infrastructure investments to support etailing for effective visitors. Palmer and Lindeman's study focuses on consumer markets and three different market mechanisms used for e-business. The three market mechanisms are direct search, broker and dealer. They have conducted an empirical comparison on three consecutive cases, PriceMarket, NetMarket and Bottom Dollar, on the trust mechanisms, reputational ratings, information quality, availability, speed and liquidity. They found significant differences across these three models. The basic message is that different market mechanisms, or mix of mechanisms are appropriate in different buyer-seller and product context in the consumer market. The article by Craighead and Shaw looks at ebusiness from a resource-based perspective of the entire supply chain. They propose a model that represents an integration of supply chain with indirect and direct value for the customer at multiple points in a supply chain. They also provide a set of matrices that enable managers and researchers to conceptualize the business rules provided by the model. Their model shows the role of information technology and the supply chain in creating value with e-commerce applications. Krieger and Muller consider possibilities for benefiting from the value created when Internet communities solve problems of collective actions. They focus on the beliefs of the community members, and use a metaphorical approach to describe Internet communities, focusing on their legitimacy and reproduction. They also offer a framework on how the value created can be translated into profit. Krieger and Muller conclude that it is not enough to consider success as the ability to legitimize the community, but the communal entrepreneur must also position the community to its competitive environment.