Pick one e-commerce company on the Internet, for example, Ashford.com, Buy.com, Yahoo.com, or Priceline.com. Study the Web pages that describe the company and explain its purpose and structure. Use the Web to find articles that comment on the company. Then visit the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Web site at www.sec.gov and select Filings & Forms to access the company’s 10-K (annual report) form showing income statements and balance sheets. Select only the sections of the 10-K form containing the desired portions of financial statements that you need to examine, and download them into your spreadsheet. (The Laudon Web site for Chapter 10 provides more detailed instructions on how to download this 10-K data into a spreadsheet.) Create simplified spreadsheets of the company’s balance sheets and income statements for the past three years.

•           Is the company a dot-com success, borderline business, or failure? What information dictates the basis of your decision? Why? When answering these questions, pay special attention to the company’s three-year trends in revenues, costs of sales, gross margins, operating expenses, and net margins.

•           Prepare an overhead presentation (with a minimum of five slides), including appropriate spreadsheets or charts, and present your work to your professor and classmates.