It is our pleasure to welcome you to the Sixth International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC04). The program of ICEC04 is made up of a wide spectrum of high-quality, research papers. We have had more than 140 submissions coming from all continents of our world. This gives the conference a real international context. All papers have been thoroughly reviewed by at least two qualified expert reviewers; most of the papers have been reviewed by three reviewers. ICEC04 features 78 papers of consistently high quality and originality divided over the five tracks. We wish to thank all authors for their dedications, for dealing with the reviewers comments and for their prompt reactions to the conference office.The Internet provides tremendous opportunities for innovation and improvement of businesses. Over the past years developments have led to a shift of more compelling service and customer orientation. The new challenge is to create customer value in service processes and to take the complete architecture from service design to deployment into consideration. The Internet offers unique opportunities for individuals, businesses and government to seek new ways of achieving higher levels of services both qualitatively and quantitatively at substantially lower costs. Many hurdles still need to be taken, and much can be learned from past experience. However, the amount of research in services is still limited. This conference provides a forum to share invaluable experience of good practices and pitfalls in strategy planning, design, development, engineering and implementation of e-services.ICEC'2004 is sponsored by the International Center for Electronic Commerce (ICEC), which has been established in 1996 as a non-profit research organization to become a leading international center for research in technologies, their commercial applications and management, standardization and other basic frameworks related to electronic commerce.