The e-service concept has been a central concern in many researchand practitioner areas in recent years. There are expectations of citizens, customers,commercial companies and public organizations of what e-services are,their functionality and benefits. However, there is conceptual confusion thatmay hamper collaboration and research viability. This paper explores the conceptualvagueness and presents an empirical investigation of how the e-serviceconcept is treated in practice, along with its kindred concept “IT service”. Resultsshow that public and commercial organizations approach e-services differently,that translation problems can cause lack of comparability in research results,and that additional concepts may be introduced instead of e-service.