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Retail / Electronic commerce
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 of2005, 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 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 andaffinity
programs can help in this respect.
- Providing reliability and Parallel servers, redundancy, 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 thecutting edge oftechnology 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, orPERT 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.
Suppliers offering services to electronic commerce practitioners
- PayPal
- Yahoo!
- www.usemybank.com (Canada)
- www.payzip.com (Singapore)
Entities using electronic commerce
See also
- Bricks and clicks business model
- Business-to-business electronic commerce
- Business-to-consumer electronic commerce
- Disintermediation
- Electronic business
- E-marketing
- Internet Fraud
- Management
- Marketing
- Online auction business model
- Reintermediation
- Web traffic
- Bcommerce
Finding related topics
- list of information technology management topics
- list of management topics
- list of computing topics
- list of marketing topics
- list of Internet topics
- list of economics topics
- list of finance topics
- list of accounting topics
- list of human resource management topics
- list of business law topics
- list of production topics
- list of business ethics, political economy, and philosophy of business topics
- list of business theorists
- list of economists
- list of corporate leaders
- list of companies
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