While E-Commerce has proven itself to be something of a shakey business model for most organizations it is still an extremely popular form of Web Service. More and more money is being spent on the web, and more people are turning to it to do things from paying the bills to remembering their mother's birthday. While many people are trying to make money via very conventional brick and mortar methods (usually with a little web twist), other people are more clever. They give you a service for free, sell ads which are targeted at your needs (since they know all about you from your habits on the site), and sometimes they sell statistics about you the consumer. It does sound a little big-brother-esque, but since the advent of targeted marketing everything about you is observed as closely as possible. Is this model profitable?

• Amazon.com: The veritable poster boy of e-commerce, this company lost money at a rate that any dot-bomb would envy. Just recently they decided to "do the right thing", raise their prices to the point where they were making money, and try and turn a profit. Their years of loss paid off and they are now a profitable company. What is their secret, besides some very savvy business planning? They built a genuinely useful site. The amount of content on a site aimed to sell you stuff is amazing. While they do have professional reviewers and editors much of their content comes from users. Want to know how good the latest John Grisham is? Well check out the user and editor's reviews. Looking for a new Rock CD? Check out the Best of 2002 list. They carefully track your clicks and are constantly advertising other products for you to buy. Their database of information on users and their buying habits is probably a marketeers dream. I don't know if they sell that information, but if they want to really demonstrate themselves to be a soulless corporation they should get to it.
• Cars.com: In the United States owning a car is one of the signs of citizenship. The only way it could be more important is if the government took away your right to vote if you didn't have a vehicle registered under your name. Cars.com, while having lots of information about your favorite car, and hosting the website of those Public Radio celebs from Car Talk, also provides a great service for finding your dream car. If you want a Standard BMW 850 (like I do), you can go to their website, enter the model, your zip code, and a radius from where you live in which to look. You can then sort the results by distance, price, whatever, and see if there are any BMW 850's for sale near you. Unfortunately they are all out of my price range, and are usually automatics, but a boy can dream. The benefits of their service is apparent to anyone involved with cars. The dealers can pay to advertise their supply on the site, and they can charge Pep Boys lots of money to advertise new gas tanks to anyone buying an old Pinto. While I don't know if it is profitable, it sure should be!*

* Tristan Cohen is in no way affiliated with Cars.com, but if they could get him a good deal on a BMW 850, he would gladly work as a web lacky for a year