Internet’s World Wide Web (WWW) is viewed as a strategic information technology with the potential to change the rules by which organizations conduct business as it provides new means of advertisement, sales, customer services, logistics, and business communications. Another important network application phenomenon is electronic commerce (EC). Although WWW is a worldwide application by definition, little is known about the profiles of EC activities on the WWW around the world. In this environment, this study attempts to shed light on understanding EC and the WWW and conducts research, as an example of phenomena surrounding them, on consumer-oriented EC on the WWW comparing the U.S. and Japanese practices