Introduction to E-Commerce | E-Commerce - B Com PDF Download

INTRODUCTION

In the past few years, enterprises across the globe have experienced significant changes in their business information system. Huge investments were made in enterprise resource planning system implementations but still they struggle to get timely information that is needed to make effective business decision and to ensure continuous growth of enterprises. Placing "e" in front of any process or function seemed to be the magic prescription for never ending story of success and rapid returns for enterprises. Ebusiness, e-procurement, e-sales, e-payment, e-banking, e-CRM, e-CAD, e-delivery are just a few. Internet, for example is becoming one of the most popular medium in transmitting various data. Users can find any kind of information within a shorter time compared with conventional method that consumes more time.
The emergence of the Internet through out the world has been contributing such a variety medium in doing business as well as people lifestyle. In fact, Internet is the essential prerequisite for the existence of E- commerce. Electronic commerce or e-commerce has been defined as the ability to perform transactions involving the exchange of goods or services between two or more parties using electronic tools and technique. The explosion of  E-commerce  has  created  new  phenomena  in  our  lifestyle  especially  in shopping activities. Consumers can easily buy products or services like magazines and airlines tickets via Internet.

DEFINITION

The word commerce is the basic concept for electronic commerce, pertaining to buying and selling of goods while ‘commercial’ denotes business practice and activities intended to make profits. Electronic commerce, like any other business, deals with the exchange of money for soft or hard goods and services.

Kalakota and Whintons in 1997 defined the term E-commerce from different perspectives.

These perspectives are:

• Communication

• Business Process

• Service

• Online

Communication Perspective: According to this perspective, E-commerce is the delivery of information, product/services or payments over tele-communication channels, computer networks or any other electronic mode of communication.

Business Process Perspective: This says that E-commerce is the application of technology towards the automation of business transactions and work flow.

Service Perspective: E-commerce is defines as a tool that addresses the desire of firms, consumers and management to cut service cost while improving the quality of goods/services and increasing the speed of service delivery.

Online Perspective: E-commerce provides the capability of buying and selling products and information on the internet and other online services.

The term commerce is treated as transaction between business partners. Therefore, the term e-commerce seems to fairly narrow to people. Thus some time we use the term ebusiness. It is a broader definition of e-commerce. There is confusion among the consultants and the academicians over the use of this term. Some think that e-commerce encompasses all world of electronically based organizational activities that support a firm’s market exchanges – including a firm’s entire information system’s infrastructure. On the other hand, some argue that e-business encompasses the entire world of internal and external electronically based activities including e-commerce.

“E-commerce has the potential to unleash enormous savings and business efficiencies,  but the practicalities remain elusive. How will e-commerce change the global planning and purchasing of transport and logistics in the supply chain? Logistics has been described as the key enabler for e-business – but how can individual logistics and transport companies ensure that they benefit from, rather than perish in, the e-commerce 
revolution?”

Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) is electronic business. It’s using the power of computers, the Internet and shared software to send and receive product specifications and drawings; bids, purchase orders and invoices; and any other type of data that needs to be communicated to customers, suppliers, employees or the public.

E-commerce is the new, profitable way to conduct business which goes beyond the simple movement of information and expands electronic transactions from point-of-sale requirements, determination and production scheduling, right through to invoicing, payment and receipt. E-commerce uses key standards and technologies including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Technical Data Interchange (TDI), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), and the Standard for Exchange of Product model data (STEP). E-commerce is made possible through the expanded technologies of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Value-Added  
Networks.

The Internet is a world wide collection of computer networks, co-operating with each other to exchange data using a common software standard. Through telephone wires and satellite links, Internet users can share information in a variety of forms. The size, scope and design of the Internet allows users to connect easily through ordinary personal computers and local phone numbers, exchange electronic mail (E-mail) with friends and colleagues with accounts on the Internet, post information for others to access, and  update it frequently, access multimedia information that includes sound, photographic images  and  even  video,  and  access  diverse  perspectives  from  around  the  world.  An additional attribute of the Internet is that it lacks a central authority—in other words, there is no "Internet, Inc." that controls the Internet. Beyond the various governing boards that work to establish policies and standards, few rules and answers to no single organization bind the Internet.

Different people use different terminology such as 'electronic trading' 'electronic procurement' 'electronic purchasing' or 'electronic marketing'. From the above definition, we can conclude that electronic commerce is often used in a much broader sense, to mean essentially the same as 'electronic business'. In other words e-commerce includes purchases of goods, services and other financial transactions in which the interactive process is mediated by information or digital technology at both locationally separate, ends of the interchange. Here 'transactions' include both specification of goods and service required and commitment to buy. E-commerce transaction model can be in terms of business to business (B2B), business to customer (B2C) or customer to customer (C2C).