The Struggle for E-Commerce SurvivalSummary: How can e-businesses succeed in the new millennium? This paper examines both trends developing industry-wide and within individual companies, from requirements to remain competitive to public assurance of safety. It hasn't been an easy year for e-commerce. With so many electronics businesses failing and so many emerging, the key to survival has been attracting and retaining customers. However, different businesses need different approaches, one being the use of online coupons. At the same time, the industry's image is improving as security is addressed - specifically, trust related to online purchases with credit cards. Creating and retaining a customer base on the Internet is not an easy task. Different companies need to take different approaches, depending on their product and their competitors. To analyze these companies, we divided them into types: the niche competitor and the direct competitor. The niche competitor is exactly what the name implies. These are companies with a specific niche: their customer base comes from the fact that they offer a one-of-a-kind service. An example of this is the online auction site Ebay. Ebay provides a service that, when it launched, was non-existent on the Internet. Today, there is no other online auction site that can compete with Ebay in terms of number of users and/or visits per day. Boasting over 10 million registered users as of December 1999, Ebay had over 3 million items listed for sale in over 3,000 categories in the same month [3]. PC Data Online, a service that rates websites based on the volume of traffic they receive, placed Ebay at No. 8 in its monthly Top 100. No other auction-focused sites made the list [6]. However, for a niche competitor to succeed against similar niche competitors, it must offer both a good product and good advertising. Ebay managed to saturate the market with advertisements early and quickly, and to offer a user-friendly and attractive interface. Ebay's early competitors weren't as successful - while Ebay advertised on TV, most didn't, and most auction sites simply weren't as good than those on Ebay. Even today, Yahoo! Auctions pale in comparison to Ebay, aesthetically. Indeed, Ebay is both a well-optimized site and a household name and has thus been able to repel and retain customers from potential competitors such as Yahoo! Auctions and AuctionNet.