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Home > Electronic commerce

Electronic commerce or e-commerce consists of the buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services over computer networks. The information technology industry might see it as an electronic business application aimed at commercial transactions.

An alternative definition of e-commerce might view it as the conduct of business commercial communications and management through electronic methods, such as electronic data interchange and automated data-collection systems.

Electronic commerce may also involve the electronic transfer of information between businesses ( EDI).

According to Forrester Research (as cited in Kessler, 2003), electronic commerce generated sales worth US $12.2 billion in 2003.

1 Historical development

The meaning of the term "electronic commerce" has changed over time. Originally, "electronic commerce" meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, usually using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI, introduced in the late 1970s) to send commercial documents like purchase orderA Purchase Order is a commercial document issued by a Buyer to a Seller, indicating the products, quantities and agreed prices for products or services that the Seller will provide to the Buyer. The Purchase Order usually contains: PO #, Date, Billing Adds or invoiceAn Invoice is a commercial document issued by a Seller to a Buyer, indicating the products, quantities and agreed prices for products or services that the Seller has already provided the Buyer with. An Invoice indicates that, unless paid in advance, paymes electronically.

Later it came to include activities more precisely termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide WebThe World Wide Web (the Web or WWW for short) is a distributed hypertext system that operates over the Internet. Basic terms Hypertext is viewed using a program called a web browser which retrieves pieces of information, called "documents" or " web pages" via secure servers (note HTTPSHTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the communication protocol of the World Wide Web. It was invented by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authentication and encrypted communication and is used in electronic commerce. Instead of using plain, a special server protocolIn computing, a protocol is a convention or standard that controls or enables the connection, communication, and data transfer between two computing endpoints. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of the two. At the lowest which encryptsThis article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. For an overview of cryptographic technology related to encryption, see cryptography. In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special confidential ordering data for customer protection) with e- shopping cartA shopping cart (also called a buggy or a trolley in British English) is a cart supplied by a shop, especially a supermarket, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter, and, after paying, often also to thes and with electronic pay services, like credit card payment authorizations.

2 Key success factors in e-commerce

Several factors have a role in the success of any e-commerce venture. They may include:

1. Providing value to customers. Vendors can achieve this by offering a product or product-line that attracts potential customers at a competitive price, as in non-electronic commerce.
2. Providing service and performance. Offering a responsive, user-friendly purchasing experience, just like a flesh-and-blood retailer, may go some way to achieving these goals.
3. Providing an attractive website. The tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage may aid success in this respect.
4. Providing an incentive for customers to buy and to return. Sales promotions to this end can involve coupons, special offers, and discounts. Cross-linked websites and advertising affiliate programs can also help.
5. Providing personal attention. Personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers may go some of the way to substituting for the face-to-face human interaction found at a traditional point of sale.
6. Providing a sense of community. Chat rooms, discussion boards, soliciting customer input, loyalty schemes and affinity programs can help in this respect.
7. Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.
8. Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer. However, customers may not appreciate the big brother experience.
9. Owning the customer's total experience. E-tailers foster this by treating any contacts with a customer as part of a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous with the brand.
10. Streamlining business processes, possibly through re-engineering and information technologies.
11. Letting customers help themselves. Provision of a self-serve site, easy to use without assistance, can help in this respect.
12. Helping customers do their job of consuming. E-tailers can provide such help through ample comparative information and good search facilities. Provision of component information and safety-and- health comments may assist e-tailers to define the customers' job.
13. Constructing a commercially sound business model. If this key success factor had appeared in textbooks in 2000, many of the dot.coms might not have gone bust.
14. Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies -- the opposite of a one-stop shop. (Electronic stores can appear either specialist or generalist if properly programmed.)
15. Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes (but remembering that the fundamentals of commerce remain indifferent to technology).
16. Setting up an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the economic, social and physical environment.

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