(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Web commerce revolution was originally scheduled for 1996. That was the year, according to the pundits, when both consumers and businesses would start spending like crazy, visiting virtual malls where they would purchase everything from blue jeans to ball bearings. Some consumers actually did purchase a few items, but companies, for the most part, sidestepped Net sales to focus on internal Web applications. So what emerged instead was the year of the intranet.

This year's heralded breakthroughs include secure electronic transaction standards and industrial-strength security. But well into 1997, corporate Websites that support commercial transactions remain scarce. What is holding up the next wave of Internet business?

Tom Anderson, director of corporate communications and strategist for the Website at Millipore in Bedford, Massachusetts, has been contemplating that very question for two years. As far back as fall 1995, Millipore's internal planning documents called for rapid implementation of "full commerce on the Web, with order status, pricing and availability, and online ordering." A $619-million-a-year company that makes filtration products that do things like purifying water for laboratories and detecting contaminants in gases used to manufacture semiconductors, Millipore seems perfectly suited for Web commerce. Its customers, including Eli Lilly, Genentech, Intel, and Motorola, are active on the Web. The company Website, www.millipore.com, attracts more than 40,000 visitors a month, mostly current or potential customers wanting information about Millipore and its products.

They aren't often disappointed. Millipore's Website is easy to use and richly detailed, with multiple search engines, online support, extensive product catalogues, and links to scientific communities. Customers in Japan, Finland, and ten other countries can access local contacts and content in the appropriate language. Since 1995, the depth of online documentation has expanded from a few hundred screens to more than 10,000. With jazzy items like QuickTime product videos and 3-D modeling of complex specifications, the site is a lot more than a text-based snore. About the only thing customers won't find on Millipore's Website are the functions Anderson calls "the Four Horsemen of electronic commerce"--pricing, product availability, ordering, and payment.

Selling products online would justify the expense of a larger Web presence by giving Millipore executives actual revenues. "It's hard to quantify the value of communication and online promotion; that's the kind of thing you mainly notice when it's missing," says John Larkin, vice president of information systems. "Our primary agenda is how to make money using the Web. But we are still trying to figure out the next step."

Technological glitches account for some of the delay. Millipore found that integrating Web-based commerce with the company's Oracle database applications was harder than it seemed. Millipore looked into selling its products via existing electronic-commerce sites that promise soup-to-nuts support for secure Web transactions. But one online mall had such obvious security holes that Millipore's marketing staff hacked into supposedly confidential information within minutes. Another service seemed able to process batches of customer orders securely but couldn't give customers real-time feedback about product availability and order status.

But even more fundamental barriers are blocking E-commerce. Like many multinational companies, Millipore charges different, and typically higher, prices for products distributed outside the U.S. The higher prices cover the cost of doing business and providing local support services abroad, but they also boost the profitability of Millipore's international divisions. Putting pricing information onto the Web threatens that differential pricing structure. Millipore could conceivably design its system so that customers could only see the prices and information that apply specifically to them--but a technical solution wouldn't address the underlying problem. If Millipore's international customers are going to give up their relationships with local distributors and order directly via the Web, they're bound to demand lower prices. Needing time to address this kind of dilemma, Larkin hopes for a grace period of several years before online ordering becomes a critical necessity.

Millipore customers seem more than willing to wait. Asked in an online survey what kind of improvements they'd like to see in Millipore's Website, the majority of respondents ranked the ability to check product availability well ahead of order status and online ordering. Online payment ranked lowest. So despite the hullabaloo over E-commerce, customers may not even want it!

In light of this lack of demand, Millipore executives worry that moving too quickly to Web commerce would put them out of sync with the market, while exposing potentially damaging pricing and product-availability information to competitors. Sooner or later, everyone agrees, Millipore will move its business transactions to the Web. But that final push will take more than technical breakthroughs. It must be driven by customer demand, aggressive moves by close competitors, or even the development of a universally accepted model for virtual distribution.

Another Millipore executive, Douglas B. Jacoby, sums up management opinion: "We need to avoid putting in too many Web resources ahead of the demand curve. Better to maintain a creative tension about the right balance of services than to let our electronic commerce advocates run out ahead."

Looks like the big bang for Web commerce has been postponed once again.

MARY J. CRONIN is a professor of management at Boston College and strategic adviser to Mainspring Communications. An expanded version of her column is available online at www.mainspring.com. Cronin can be reached at cronin@mainspring.com.