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E-Commerce
E-Commerce is about setting your business on the Internet, allowing visitors to access your website, and go through a virtual catalog of your products / services online. When a visitor wants to buy something he/she likes, they merely, "add" it to their virtual shopping basket. Items in the virtual shopping basket can be added or deleted, and when you're all set to checkout...you head to the virtual checkout counter, which has your complete total, and will ask you for your name, address etc. and method of payment (usually via credit card). Once you have entered all this information (which by the way is being transmitted securely) you can then just wait for delivery. That is E-Commerce, precisely!
Electronic commerce, or E-Commerce, is a very broad term. E-commerce conducted between businesses differs from that carried out between a business and its consumers. For business-to-consumer E-Commerce, the Web has become the dominant pipeline. Think Amazon.com. The company offers lots of books for sale on its Web site. Consumers find what they like, type in their credit card number and unpack the books a few days later. Conducting individual stock trades, moving money from checking to savings or tracking an overnight package delivery via the Internet are other examples.
In E-Commerce, companies can sell their products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on-line, even without a staffed office. This facilitates international trade, especially from countries in significantly different time zones.
E-Commerce provides the opportunity to work out of the home, or eliminate the need for a formal office set up at all. Also companies don’t have to establish local offices in other countries. E-Commerce allows small companies to compete with larger companies. An Internet search will bring up pages of sites with information about a particular topic or product; therefore, small company’s sites can be listed alongside those of large companies. The size and age of a company cannot be determined by the website unless that information is offered specifically.
E-Commerce information can be electronically integrated into many aspects of the organization. Some software can integrate on-line order information into the local accounting or manufacturing systems. Other software can integrate marketing and sales, purchasing and logistics, production, design and engineering.
The difference between ebusiness and E-Commerce;
· The term ‘E-Commerce’ has a narrower meaning than ‘ebusiness’. It refers to using the Internet to order and pay for products or services. So E-Commerce is a sub-set of ebusiness.
· E-Commerce happens when a consumer buys a ticket online or buys something from the art shop and pays for it either when they receive the product or directly online at the time of ordering. It happens when an organization pays another organization for supplies via its website.
· E-Commerce refers specifically to paying for goods and services, whereas ebusiness covers the full range of business activities that can happen, or be assisted, via email or the Web.
With business-to-business E-Commerce growing all the time, there are significant possibilities for systems which provide access to existing assets such as legacy system database, warehouse systems, and information sources. Such systems can also deliver information, receive payment, and update records - by building “glue” to bring them together rather than throwing your existing assets away and starting again.
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