Editing Electronic business (section)

====Cost structure====
The business internet which supports e-business has a cost to maintain of about $2 trillion in outsourced IT dollars just in the United States alone.  With each website custom crafted and maintained in code, the maintenance burden is enormous.  In the twenty-first century, look for new businesses that will help standardize the look and feel of the internet presence of a business to be more uniform in nature to help reduce the cost of maintenance.

The cost structure for e-businesses varies a lot from the industry they operate in. There are two major categories that have commune characteristics. The first group is fully digital businesses that do not provide any products or services outside of the digital world. This includes for example software companies, social networks, etc. For those, the most significant operational cost is the maintenance of the platform. Those costs are almost unrelated to every additional customer the business acquires, making the marginal cost almost equal to zero. This is one of the major advantages of that kind of business. The second group are businesses that provide services or products outside of the digital world, like online shops, for those costs are much harder to determine. Some common advantages over traditional businesses are lower marketing cost, lower inventory cost, lower payroll, lower rent, etc.<ref>{{cite web |last=Rodrigue |first=J-P. |title=Comparison Between Retail and E-commerce Cost Structures for a $150 Apparel Piece |work=The Geography of Transport Systems |date=28 November 2017 |url=https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter7/logistics-freight-distribution/ecommerce-cost-structure/ |access-date=5 June 2021}}</ref>