Look back at the £160m spent on-line by British buyers in 1998 and one could be forgiven for dismissing e-commerce as an irrelevance. Few British companies other than web site design agencies have made a profit from this "revolution" in commerce. The hype hardly seems to be borne out by reality.

Look forward and a different picture becomes apparent. Forrester Research forecasts the value of e-commerce in the UK will have grown almost fifty-fold by the end of 2000 to £7.5bn. Their figures may prove optimistic but there can be little doubt e-commerce will quickly become a significant channel of trade.

Businesses that continue to look backward will find themselves facing a rapidly increasing threat from competitors which have been quicker to grasp the opportunities that e-commerce presents. There will be many casualties amongst the laggards.

There will be casualties amongst the leaders too. The world of e-commerce is developing very rapidly. New technologies and business initiatives are surfacing at an extraordinary rate. Many of them will prove to be commercial dead-ends. Others will be rapidly overtaken by superior alternatives.

But that is no excuse for turning one's back on e-commerce. No business which waits until the e-commerce economy has matured can ever hope to be any more than an also-ran. It is essential to learn as much as possible about the topic without delay.