Business School, University of Paisley, Scotland, UK

The aim of this project is to discover how e-commerce is conducted and utilised in geographically dispersed and lowly populated areas, in direct comparison to those very same issues within populated and clustered areas. The overall aim is to discover the benefits that e-commerce brings to rural/remote communities, however; in order to achieve that aim, it is necessary to understand how e-commerce is applied in those areas and the fundamental differences and difficulties that e-commerce faces in remote/rural areas. This will be tackled by means of a literature review which will firstly define e-business along with its key phenomena as well as various areas within e-commerce that relate directly to issues of geographical displacement such as logistics, Government policy and how geography dictates the selection, formulation and use of e-commerce models and strategies. The technological issues that dictate the transmission and delivery of e-commerce in lowly populated and remote areas will be explored in order to measure the technical barriers to e-commerce from both the consumers and the business point of view. Although these are the core issues conceived by the author of being key to the project, it is expected other key issues will be discovered as a direct result of the literature review.

Today we are living in the midst of the information revolution where everything from work to leisure, communications and shopping are being revolutionised through the use of computers and more precisely by the use of the World Wide Web and its emergent technologies (Cairncross 1997, Chen 2001, Leamer & Storper 2001). The potential of the web is just beginning to be realised and the possibilities are mind numbing for commerce and public, for both buyer and seller, equally startling are the effects the web has had on all global society and the future effects still to come. In terms of the consumer perspective traditional methods of working, retail buying, receiving education and leisure activities may soon become secondary methods as many innovations are providing a genuine, often more convenient alternative method to carry out these tasks. In addition to business servicing public consumers, the way in which businesses deal with other businesses is also changing beyond all recognition with the web in collusion with modern IT practices facilitating business and providing competitive advantages in all areas of the modern organisation. Thus far the extent of these changes has impacted greatly on the world economy and on the lives of its peoples. It could be argued that these changes have only become noticeable to the layman in very recent times; it really was not so long ago when a newspaper could be opened or a television switched on without adverts for websites, corresponding e-mail addresses and the like spilling out all over the place. However, in reality it wasn't so long ago, only in the last three years or so, in the UK at least, have we noticed a massive change in the way we conduct day-to-day routines, shopping, education, communications to name but a few.