There is little question that the Internet is the most powerful force driving the emergence of electronic commerce. Since 1988 the number of host computers connected to the Internet has doubled every year. There are now five million servers connected to the Net, according to Reilly Associates, and approxiately 30 million individual users.
1 More than 118,000 Internet domain names have been assigned to commercial businesses, representing 51 percent of domain registrations.
2 The stunning growth potential of the medium was illustrated in 1993 when the World Wide Web was introduced. Within 18 months, the base of connected PCs grew 20 times, to an estimated 10 million people in October 1995,a number estimated to rise to 52 million by the year 2000, according to Forrester Research. There were an estimated 27,000 Web sites in April 1995, and that population is doubling every 53 days, according to Sun Microsystems Inc.3 It stood at 110,000 sites by October 1995, according to the Yahoo! online guide service. The aggregation of such large numbers of people through electronic means with multimedia capabilities and user-friendly navigation software for multipoint-to-multipoint communication has created an irresistibly attractive foundation for commerce.

Jerry Michalski of Release 1.0 explains the appeal of Internet-mediated commerce:[The Internet] offers easy, flat-rate, wide-area connectivity with relatively low cost structures. It doesn�t cost any more to link to Austin than to the server in the next city. It is organic and self- organizing but not easy to see. Although it is less reliable than other data networks, the Internet has a wider variety of useful protocols to build applications on than the phone, value-added network and cable-TV sys-tems combined. The Internet is the first real distributed applications platform.4 Through such an infrastructure one can imagine a countless array of new tactics for improving sales, marketing, distribution, credit and payment, and other business activities.

For all the Internet�s immense promise as a platform for commerce, practical complications immediately arise. It is unclear what sustainable concepts will appeal to online consumers, for example. It is not clear what kinds of new intermediaries are best suited for facilitating transactions, how security can be best ensured, and how advertising practices can be adapted (or not) to this radically new milieu. Establishing consumer trust and brand identity remain unresolved issues. More subtly, the strange eco-nomics and interpersonal dynamics of interactive media remain murky. Finally, the efficacy of international laws and federal regulation may be problematic in governing the online world.Despite these practical complications,Internet Marketing is no doubt going to be very popular in the future. Also, majority of businesses will be conducted online in the future.