Can knowledge be created exclusively from online sources? A business intelligence approach in ecommerce

As more and more business data is generated and made available in the online environment, it makes sense for all the business components to start and take advantage of this trend. One of the components that we targeted in this paper is business knowledge, more precisely gathering enough data and information in order to generate knowledge about a business, also known as business intelligence. But this could not be done without taking into account the global pandemic that started in 2020 and continued to this day, accelerating the business digitization trend exponentially. Numerous papers related to the forced digitization of businesses due to Covid-19 have been published in 2020, most of them being focused on job loss, business model shifts, the economic impact and governmental stimulus effect in various industries. The current paper is focused on the business knowledge creation, more exactly on how and where to find data and information in an exclusively online manner about Romanian ecommerce companies, that can then be processed in order to obtain business knowledge. We researched three Romanian ecommerce websites in order to see if meaningful knowledge about their business approach can be extracted, all being done entirely from online sources, with no physical connection or relation to the targeted companies. In order to achieve this, we used public traffic data from websites like www.trafic.ro, financial data from www.listafirme.ro and also tested a few other key metrics of the websites. We managed to identify a very interesting situation concerning the three ecommerce websites while also outlining a simple workflow that can be duplicated by anyone in order to obtain basic business intelligence about Romanian internet-focused companies.