pidly growing supply chain. The potential market that the Internet provides has little or no restrictions by either geography or time, and therefore poses a huge impact on any organisation considering E-commerce in it's strategic marketing formulation. Opportunities in E-commerce are enormous, as present growth and development have proved. (Kay, E. 2000) The Internet provides a virtual marketplace, providing huge opportunities in the marketing strategies that an organisation my wish to develop. Forecasters have projected that the world wide E-commerce revenues will be over $350 Billion in the year 2000. (Jones, I. 1999) User trends The trends of Internet users and in fact the use of E-commerce in general is extremely valuable information that the organisation must be aware of. By knowing how the advances of the Internet are being used, a marketing strategy can be focused keeping these ideals in mind. As E-commerce provides different uses to varying companies or industries, user trends and their relative importance differ. For example business to business electronic communication would represent different characteristic than communication relating directly to the end-consumer. Ideals such as customer tracking can be found as an integral advantage in the use of Internet based marketing. Information regarding "users" use of resources can be tracked reasonably easily on the Internet, and is a direct result of the information-based platform the Internet provides. For example Amazon.com provide e-mail announcements when a new product or service become available to its customers. (Reedy, J. Schullo, S. Zimmerman, K. 2000). Such understanding and manipulation of user information is beneficial to both consumer and suppliers. (Fig 1.) is an example of user information that may be pertinent in designing a strategy based using research of Internet use. The Graphics, Visualisation, and Usability (GVU) Centre conducted the research of this informatio...
