E-Commerce

E-commerce

Electronic commerce or it’s known as E-commerce is the actions of buying and selling over the internet websites. It has increased and grown rapidly since the internet became popular. Since the internet is the largest network and the internet users are growing and increasing really fast lately all around the world, it has helped and eased people on doing their transactions such as: paying bills, buying and selling products and getting services whenever they want. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. E-commerce is promising as an increasingly important way for businesses to reach potential customer’s goals. This paper will discuss what exactly E-commerce is, and mention some of the advantages and disadvantages.

If you ask about E-commerce most people will tell you it is the buying and selling online but actually it is really the case. If this was the case, E-commerce will not be popular as it is nowadays. E-commerce is simply the electronic exchange of business information (BI) between two or more parties and organizations. E-commerce is generally performed between businesses or known as Business-to-Business (B2B) and those that carried out between a business and its consumers or Business-to-consumer (B2C). B2B E-commerce takes place in electronic data exchange over private networks. Most organizations which have regular transaction will setup an automated and pretty fast information exchange. For B2C E-commerce, the Website has become the main medium; it includes many actions such as: buying and selling any item over the Internet, electronic fund transfer, shipment tracking, and all other methods of conducting business over digital networks. Also, there is consumer-to-consumer (C2C) E-commerce that involves consumers selling products directly to each other using the internet for example, the auction site eBay. Clearly, E-commerce has changed and will continue changing the face of business forever. Companies that are half the world away from each other can complete business transactions and exchange information in a matter of seconds instead of days.

Advantages of E-commerce

The first advantage that e-commerce own is the speed. As I said earlier, with the internet, businesses can exchange information or complete transactions almost in seconds even with slowest connection. As marketing, business owners now have the ability to change and inform the customers of their services and products they are offering over the internet. This also allows for you to update marketing and promotional materials as often and as frequently as you would like. With increased speeds of communication, the delivery time is expedited and that makes the whole transaction from start to finish more efficient.

The second advantage of the electronic commerce is the opportunity to cut costs. By using the Internet, marketing, distribution, personnel, phone, postage and printing costs, among many others, can be reduced. Companies could use the internet to get the lowest price materials for their products. With the extra funding from cutting cost, the company could maximize their advertising and marketing strategies.

The internet has no limits or boundaries which is a great thing for business owners and their consumers. Compare to a store with location, you can only start doing business in the place with low models. Online business, you can do your business over the world with only a few computers with less time. To maximize profits for business owners, they can distribute newsletters and improve customer services over the internet. With good customer services, trust and reliability could be build and strength among the businesses and the customers. No matter what business you are involved in, an online-help feature is an extraordinary advantage to have.

Disadvantages of E-commerce

The main and the first concern about e-commerce is the privacy and security. As the internet is very public, anything sent over the Internet could be interrupted by the third party or an organization before it reaches its destination. There are serious issues on personal credit card information that have been stolen to commit fraud over the internet up to this day. Personal information such as user