Ali ftahi milasi

The increased globalization of the world economies has created many pportunities for marketers. At the same time, this has also intensified competition among businesses so that many companies are looking towards unconventional forms of marketing. Marketing through the Internet is one such unconventional form of marketing that many companies have turned to. Iran is located in the Middle-East in the north of Persian Gulf and the south of Caspian Sea. Area of Iran is 1,648,043 (sq km) and its population is about 70 million. Iran is the second most populous country with the second-largest economy in the Middle-East (Asemi, 2006). Up to the late 1970s, Iran was a key hub of ICT in the Middle-East and many foreign suppliers had their own branches in Iran. The Iranian industry was very well developed in the '60s and '70s; early software systems supporting the Persian (Farsi) language were developed in Iran. After the 1979 revolution, the situation changed significantly (Nicholoson & Sahay, 2003). It had been a sharp growth of Internet users from 250,000 in 2000 to near 7.6 million in 2007 according to Internet World Stats (2007) that has the largest amount of Internet users (38.9 percent) in the Middle-East but this numbers seems smaller than the reality due to some news and government related websites statistics.

E-Commerce; Iran; E-Government; Information Communication Technology; Developing Countries