E-Commerce - Buying and Selling Goods and Services Online

E-Commerce or Electronics Commerce is a methodology of modern business which addresses the need of business organizations, vendors and customers to reduce cost and improve the quality of goods and services while increasing the speed of delivery. E-commerce refers to paperless exchange of business information using following ways.

• Electronic Data Exchange (EDI)
• Electronic Mail (e-mail)
• Electronic Bulletin Boards
• Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)
• Other Network-based technologies

Features

E-Commerce provides following features

·        Non-Cash Payment − E-Commerce enables use of credit cards, debit cards, smart cards, electronic fund transfer via bank's website and other modes of electronics payment.

·        24x7 Service availability − E-commerce automates business of enterprises and services provided by them to customers are available anytime, anywhere. Here 24x7 refers to 24 hours of each seven days of a week.

·        Advertising / Marketing − E-commerce increases the reach of advertising of products and services of businesses. It helps in better marketing management of products / services.

·        Improved Sales − Using E-Commerce, orders for the products can be generated any time, any where without any human intervention. By this way, dependencies to buy a product reduce at large and sales increases.

·        Support − E-Commerce provides various ways to provide pre sales and post sales assistance to provide better services to customers.

·        Inventory Management − Using E-Commerce, inventory management of products becomes automated. Reports get generated instantly when required. Product inventory management becomes very efficient and easy to maintain.

·      Communication improvement − E-Commerce provides ways for faster, efficient, reliable communication with customers and partners.

Technical Disadvantages

·        There can be lack of system security, reliability or standards owing to poor implementation of e-Commerce.

·        Software development industry is still evolving and keeps changing rapidly.

·  In many countries, network bandwidth might cause an issue as there is insufficient telecommunication bandwidth available.

·      Special types of web server or other software might be required by the vendor setting the e-commerce environment apart from network servers.

Non-Technical Disadvantages

·  Initial cost: The cost of creating / building E-Commerce application in-house may be very high. There could be delay in launching the E-Commerce application due to mistakes, lack of experience.

·    User resistance: User may not trust the site being unknown faceless seller. Such mistrust makes it difficult to make user switch from physical stores to online/virtual stores.

·     Security/ Privacy: Difficult to ensure security or privacy on online transactions.

E-Commerce or Electronics Commerce sites use electronic payment where electronic payment refers to paperless monetary transactions. Electronic payment has revolutionized the business processing by reducing paper work, transaction costs, labour cost. Being user friendly and less time consuming than manual processing, helps business organization to expand its market reach / expansion. Some of the modes of electronic payments are following.

• Credit Card
• Debit Card
• Smart Card
• E-Money
• Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)