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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.

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 orders or invoices electronically.

Later it came to include activities more precisely termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web via secure servers (note HTTPS, a special server protocol which encrypts confidential ordering data for customer protection) with e-shopping carts and with electronic pay services, like credit card payment authorizations.

When the Web first became well-known among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. However, it took about four years for security protocols like HTTPS to become sufficiently developed and widely deployed (during the browser wars of this period). Subsequently, between 1998 and 2000, a substantial number of businesses in the United States and Western Europe developed rudimentary Web sites.

Although a large number of "pure e-commerce" companies disappeared during the dot-com collapse in 2000 and 2001, many "brick-and-mortar" retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites. For example, after the collapse of online grocer Webvan, two traditional supermarket chains, Albertsons and Safeway, both started e-commerce subsidiaries through which consumers could order groceries online.

As of 2005, e-commerce has become well-established in major cities across much of North America, Western Europe, and certain East Asian countries like South Korea. However, e-commerce is still emerging slowly in some industrialized countries like Australia, and is practically nonexistent in many Third World countries.

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

• 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.
• 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.
• Providing an attractive website. The tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage may aid success in this respect.
• 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.
• 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.
• Providing a sense of community. Chat rooms, discussion boards, soliciting customer input, loyalty schemes and affinity programs can help in this respect.
• Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.
• 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.
• 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.
• Streamlining business processes, possibly through re-engineering and information technologies.
• Letting customers help themselves. Provision of a self-serve site, easy to use without assistance, can help in this respect.
• Helping customers do their job of consuming. E-tailers and online shopping directories 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.
• 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.
• 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.)
• 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).
• Setting up an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the economic, social and physical environment.
   

E-commerce problems
Even if a provider of E-commerce goods and services rigorously follows these sixteen "key factors" to devise an exemplary e-commerce strategy, problems can still arise. Sources of such problems include:

• Failure to understand customers, why they buy and how they buy. Even a product with a sound value proposition can fail if producers and retailers do not understand customer habits, expectations, and motivations. E-commerce could potentially mitigate this potential problem with proactive and focused marketing research, just as traditional retailers may do.
• Failure to consider the competitive situation. One may have the capability to construct a viable book e-tailing business model, but lack the will to compete with Amazon.com.
• Inability to predict environmental reaction. What will competitors do? Will they introduce competitive brands or competitive web sites. Will they supplement their service offerings? Will they try to sabotage a competitor's site? Will price wars break out? What will the government do? Research into competitors, industries and markets may mitigate some consequences here, just as in non-electronic commerce.
• Over-estimation of resource competence. Can staff, hardware, software, and processes handle the proposed strategy? Have e-tailers failed to develop employee and management skills? These issues may call for thorough resource planning and employee training.
• Failure to coordinate. If existing reporting and control relationships do not suffice, one can move towards a flat, accountable, and flexible organizational structure, which may or may not aid coordination.
• Failure to obtain senior management commitment. This often results in a failure to gain sufficient corporate resources to accomplish a task. It may help to get top management involved right from the start.
• Failure to obtain employee commitment. If planners do not explain their strategy well to employees, or fail to give employees the whole picture, then training and setting up incentives for workers to embrace the strategy may assist.
• Under-estimation of time requirements. Setting up an e-commerce venture can take considerable time and money, and failure to understand the timing and sequencing of tasks can lead to significant cost overruns. Basic project planning, critical path, critical chain, or PERT analysis may mitigate such failings.
• Profitability may have to wait for the achievement of market share.
• Failure to follow a plan. Poor follow-through after the initial planning, and insufficient tracking of progress against a plan can result in problems. One may mitigate such problems with standard tools: benchmarking, milestones, variance tracking, and penalties and rewards for variances.
• Becoming the victim of organized crime. Many syndicates have caught on to the potential of the Internet as a new revenue stream. Two main methods are as follows: (1) Using identity theft techniques like phishing to order expensive goods and bill them to some innocent person, then liquidating the goods for quick cash; (2) Extortion by using a network of compromised "zombie" computers to engage in distributed denial of service attacks against the target Web site until it starts paying protection money.

Product suitability
Certain products/services appear more suitable for online sales; others remain more suitable for offline sales. Many successful purely virtual companies deal with digital products, including information storage, retrieval, and modification, music, movies, education, communication, software, photography, and financial transactions. Examples of this type of company include: Google, eBay and Paypal.

Virtual marketers can sell some non-digital products and services successfully. Such products generally have a high value-to-weight ratio, they may involve embarrassing purchases, they may typically go to people in remote locations, and they may have shut-ins as their typical purchasers. Items which can fit through a standard letterbox - such as music CDs, DVDs and books - are particularly suitable for a virtual marketer, and indeed Amazon.com, one of the few enduring dot-com companies, has historically concentrated on this field.

Products such as spare parts, both for consumer items like washing machines and for industrial equipment like centrifugal pumps, also seem good candidates for selling online. Retailers often need to order spare parts specially, since they typically do not stock them at consumer outlets -- in such cases, e-commerce solutions in spares do not compete with retail stores, only with other ordering systems. A factor for success in this niche can consist of providing customers with exact, reliable information about which part number their particular version of a product needs, for example by providing parts lists keyed by serial number.

Purchases of pornography and of other sex-related products and services fulfil the requirements of both virtuality (or if non-virtual, generally high-value) and potential embarrassment; unsurprisingly, provision of such services has become the most profitable segment of e-commerce.

Products unsuitable for e-commerce include products that have a low value-to-weight ratio, products that have a smell, taste, or touch component, products that need trial fittings - most notably clothing - and products where colour integrity appears important. Nonetheless, Tesco.com has had success delivering groceries in the UK, albeit that many of its goods are of a generic quality, and clothing sold through the internet is big business in the U.S.

Acceptance of e-commerce
Consumers have accepted the e-commerce business model less readily than its proponents originally expected. Even in product categories suitable for e-commerce, electronic shopping has developed only slowly. Several reasons might account for the slow uptake, including:

Concerns about security. Many people will not use credit cards over the Internet due to concerns about theft and fraud.
Lack of instant gratification with most e-purchases (non-digital purchases). Much of a consumer's reward for purchasing a product lies in the instant gratification of using and displaying that product. This reward does not exist when one's purchase does not arrive for days or weeks.
The problem of access to web commerce, particularly for poor households and for developing countries. Low penetration rates of Internet access in some sectors greatly reduces the potential for e-commerce.
The social aspect of shopping. Some people enjoy talking to sales staff, to other shoppers, or to their cohorts: this social reward side of retail therapy does not exist to the same extent in online shopping.
 

Suppliers offering services to electronic commerce practitioners
PayPal
Yahoo!

Custom OSC

Entities using electronic commerce
Amazon.com
eBay

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Electronic commerce".

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