Economies of Scale and Scope in E-Business

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The paradigm shift from traditional way of doing business to e-business can also be facilitated by the economies of scale and of scope a small or medium sized companies get from the Internet. Economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to production volume. They occur when cost per unit of output decreases with increasing production volume as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output. Traditional economies of scale are often enjoyed by big enterprises. Small to medium firms rarely achieve these advantages. However, the emergence of Internet has redefined the concept of economies of scale. E-business has made low units costs for products and services, which was once the privilege that only big companies enjoyed, possible for small to medium sized firms (Rayport and Sviokla, 1995). The network technology has provided a platform for firms of all sizes to capitalize upon this economic advantage and this is especially true for firms engaged in information-driven products and IT business because the production marginal cost is next to none. In e-business, online stores have the ability to spread out their fixed costs over a larger customer base and offer a wide variety of goods to their patrons (Shapiro and Varian, 1999). The global coverage of the internet provides small business with the possibility of reaching customers oversees at affordable price or virtually no cost at all and thus achieving economies of scale in terms of the number of products sold much more cost efficient compared to the cost of producing and distributing them. Firms which use the internet for advertising and promoting their selections of goods can also achieve economies of scale in relation to marketing efforts, which come from wider functions, more prompt servers, or more stored data. Firms providing a wide selection of products or services rather than

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