Ecommerce or electric commerce refers to the buying and selling of goods and services via electronic channels, primarily the Internet. Online retail is decidedly convenient due to its 24-hour availability, global reach and generally efficient customer service
Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of business transactions
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There are several ways of locking at e-commerce:-
From a communication perspective, it is the ability to deliver products, service, information or payments via network like the internet.
From an interface view, e-commerce means information and transaction exchange business-to-business, business -to-customer, consumer-to-consumer and business-to-government.
As a business process, e-commerce means activities that support commerce electronically by networked connection.
From an online perspective, e-commerce is an electronic environment that allows sellers to buy and sell products,service and information on the internet. The products may be physical like cars, or services like news etc.
As a structure, e-commerce deals with various media data , text,web pages, internet telephony and internet desktop video.
As a market, e-commerce is a worldwide network. A local store can open a web storefront and find the world as its doorstep- custmers ,suppliers, competitors, and
Payment service
THE ADVANTAGES OF ECOMMERCE
1. Location neutral - A fantastic advantage of ecommerce
How often have you heard the words "Location, location, location"? The first advantage of ecommerce is that it is location neutral. Every website is at a prime location and your customer only has to travel the distance of a single mouse click to reach you.
2. No need for supervisors and cashiers - ecommerce has a big cost advantage
An online store or online office does not need a separate set of supervisors or cashiers. At the most it needs one person monitoring the sales. Everything happens in a neat and orderly fashion. In fact, you can open as many online stores as you like for less than 5% of what it takes to set up a brick and mortar store or office.
3. Open 24 x 7, 365 days of the year - ecommerce does not take a break
You may be asleep but in other parts of the World, customers are awake and busy shopping. Ecommerce search engine optimization lets you take full advantage of this.
4. Go international from day one. Electronic commerce internationalizes your trade in an instant!
5. Economy- by any standard, e-commerce is economical. Unlike the brick-and-mortar environment, there is no rental of physical store space,insurance or infrasture investment.
6. Customization- digital products are highly customizable. They are easy to reorgance, revive or edit.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF E-COMMERCE
These usually consist of silly mistakes on the part of either the store owner or the customer:
1. Returned items - a major disadvantage of ecommerce
Very often customers misunderstand a description or are simply in too much of a rush to bother reading the detailed product description. Thus, an electrical item such as a cell phone charger that requires 220V of electricity and meant for use when on tour in Asia, is bought for local use in USA and subsequently returned often accompanied with a nasty "this is not working" letter blaming the seller for selling sub-standard products.
2. Back charging of credit card transactions - an irritating ecommerce disadvantage
Linked to above point, the customer will reject the charges. When that happens, the credit card company will not only reverse the credit but also levy a charge on your account. It wasn't your fault but you've got to shoulder it.
3. Data entry errors - silly mistakes that are potentially expensive
Glenn, the store clerk entered the price of a box of finest pears as $0.96 instead of $10.96. Over the next two days the store owner was swamped with hundreds of orders for Pears. The missing digit nearly wiped out the profits for that month. Friends swear they saw Allan the store owner laughing and crying at the same time. Meanwhile Glenn, thanks to Allan's generous heart, is now in the packing section.
4. The search engine fog - this a big disadvantage of ecommerce
If you set up a brick and mortar store at a prominent location, you get noticed instantly and will have customers from the moment you are open for business. This is not an advantage with ecommerce. In the virtual world, the only location that matters is the location in the search engine's search results. If you're not on the first page of the search results then you are relegated to the back alleys of cyberspace.
5. Can be equally expensive - hidden costs are a major drawback of ecommerce
True, you don't have to spend on utilities or staff or for that matter, even on an office. But setting up a good online store requires a lot of hard work by professional people. First, they need to build you a good online store and then, it needs to be marketed by. The people who do it need to have special skills and deep knowledge, both of which are expensive. Successful ecommerce internet marketing of your online store results in a good search engine rank. The downside of ecommerce is that, the moment you stop spending on e-marketing, the search engine rank begins to slip. In a brick and mortar store you have to pay premium rentals for a premium location. The equivalent of premium rentals for an online store is e-marketing.
6. Rogue web hosting - a major irritation in ecommerce
My dad used to say "It's so difficult to find good help these days". I say, it's very difficult to find good web hosting these days. Dropping rates have resulted in ecommerce web hosting services companies often running themselves on little more than hot air or recruiting staff who are clearly not competent. Any resulting down-time can prove potentially expensive. It is relatively easy to find good professional help to build and market your online store or office but finding good web hosting is a different matter altogether.
THE ROLES OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND INTELLIGENT INTERFACES IN E-COMMERCE:-
intelligent agents are a member of the bot family-software programs that operate unattended, usually on the Internet. Therefore, agents are sometimes referred to as bots. Individuals or organizations use intelligent agents to perform functions or tasks that otherwise would involve human interaction or repetition. Operating independently on behalf of their users, some intelligent agents mimic human behavior and thought processes and are able to make decisions, learn, and interact with other intelligent agents. Intelligent agents come in stationary and mobile varieties, meaning that they can either reside on individual computer systems or travel from server to server across the Internet to carry out different tasks.
The use of intelligent software agents that automate the coordination activities among business partners is not only an advantage, but a necessity in the connected and networked world that companies operate in. Intelligent agents can be responsible for collecting and interpreting information of merchants and products, making decisions, even presenting payment information and settling transactions, thus reducing time and cost. They will help buyers and suppliers achieve greater efficiencies in all of the important aspects of B2B, such as content, community and transaction. Additionally, agent based e-commerce happens on the Internet and does not require the high setup costs associated with EDI. Agent technology also leverages existing infrastructure and investments. Agents can help in automating all the repetitive activities in the following business aspects: Internal functions and activities, such as accounting, order fulfillment and personnel management; External activities, such as supply chain management and eprocurement, which involve interaction with trading partners, B2B exchanges; and External customer centric activities such as eCRM, sales and services.
In the world of e-commerce, intelligent agents known as shopping bots are used by consumers to search for product and pricing information on the Web. Each shopping bot operates differently, depending on the business model used by its operator. In one scenario, shopping bots direct users to retailers who, by subscribing for a fee, are part of a closed system. Shopping.Yahoo and Shop@AOL are examples of this model. Open systems are a more common arrangement and involve agents that include the entire Web in their searches.
Shopping bots have become very popular with consumers. In Time, International Data Corp. revealed that about 4 million shoppers took advantage of the technology in October 2000 alone. However, they weren't popular with some companies because of their ability to initiate bidding wars and eat away profits in the process.
In addition to searching for durable goods, electronics and other items, consumers also were expected to use intelligent agents more frequently in the area of personal finance. In Bank Systems & Technology, a report from Andersen Consulting stated that personal financial bots (PFBs) would reshape this industry by becoming "virtual financial intermediaries" that carry out transactions and searches for financial products via ATMs, wireless phones, and televisions. While this concept had not been widely adopted in the early 2000s, it posed a possible threat to the umbrella model used by many traditional banks, in which several products and services-including loans, credit cards and insurance-were offered to customers by one provider.
Intelligent agents also provide varying levels of customer service on the Web. In addition to providing direct answers to common questions, they can save companies money by helping customers narrow down their problem before speaking to a live customer service rep. One emerging intelligent agent was able to anticipate what customers might want based on the Web pages they looked at. Created by Denver-based Finali, the netSage also was able to mimic human emotions, including disappointment if it was unable to answer a customer's question. In addition to reducing customer service costs, intelligent agents are useful for converting potential customers, many of whom abandon online "shopping carts" without making purchases, to actual customers.
Although they have been used more frequently in the consumer arena, intelligent agents also have potential applications in the area of business-to-business e-commerce. For example, a manufacturer requiring many different parts to create one product could use an intelligent agent to not only find the best prices from different suppliers, but to consider many other variables that impact the total manufacturing cost, such as shipping, cost and quality. Theoretically, the intelligent agent could do this more quickly and efficiently than a human. Ultimately, this could result in significant cost savings for companies.
By maximizing efficiency and convenience, intelligent agents will likely play increasingly important roles in the world of e-commerce. In Computer Reseller News, the Gartner Group estimated that bots would account for as much as four percent of all IT spending by 2002. The following statement from IBM, printed in Computerworld, is further indication of the key role this technology will play in the near future: "We envision the Internet some years hence as a seething milieu in which billions of economically motivated software agents find and process information… Agents will naturally evolve from facilitators into decision-makers."
As IBM's vision becomes reality, security will become a concern for buyers and sellers alike. When consumers send agents out with strategic objectives and the ability to negotiate terms and conditions and make purchases on their behalf, they will need assurances that the agents can't be manipulated or compromised by other agents. Likewise, companies will need to watch for agents that are used for malicious purposes.
