How e-commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support?

Why use E-commerce??

Reduce Cycle Time

Traditionally, producers sell their products to customers through intermediaries such as wholesaler and retailer. E-commerce eliminates those middlemen between sellers and buyers by removing links from trading chain and put producers directly in touch with the customers. It provides a 24 hours store that also reduces sale cycle and reduces unnecessary phone calls and mailings.

Improves Employees’ Empowerment

E-commerce also improves employees’ empowerment where provides enabling technologies for the company’s employees. It can improve employee knowledge and effectiveness, which reduces contact handle times. Other than that, E-commerce increase employees’ empowerment by providing better decision support and reference tools and provide desktop enhancement for employees for data access and retrieval. Thus, it improves employees’ morale and loyalty.

Facilitates Customer Support

On the consumer level, an individual can go online to purchase anything from books, grocery to expensive items like real estate, online bill payments, buying stocks, transferring funds from one account to another, and initiating wire payment to another country. All these activities can be done with a few keystrokes on the keyboard. Using e-commerce gives customers the opportunity and shop at their convenience and at their place. They can access into e-commerce from home, office, or on the road, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. Besides, it slowly builds loyalty since it is so convenient and saves time.

The history and evolution of E-Commerce

The word E-Commerce or electronic commerce was founded late in the 1970’s. The term was introduced for transactions done via computer to computer.

There have been several key steps in the history and evolution of E-Commerce. To interchange data and to carry out business deals electronically in 1960’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was formulated. Initially ecommerce was facilitating business transactions electronically using technology such as EDI (electronic data interchange) and EFT (electronic funds transfer) to send business documents such as purchase orders or invoices. However, in 1984 the ASC X12 standard became stable and reliable in transferring large amounts of transactions. In 1969 ARPANET, was developed by Americas department of defence for researching new reliable networks and later this enhanced into Internet that was purely used as a research tool for nearly 20yrs.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee developed World Wide Web at CERN that started the first Internet transaction. These technology supported exchange of data that was in text format only. The next major step occurred in 1993, Mosiac was developed by Marc Andreessen, this is the first graphic web browser. The Mosaic browser was quickly adapted into a downloadable browser. Netscape, the most successful graphic browser was later developed by Marc Andreessen. On the other hand, Microsoft came up with Microsoft Internet Explorer. The first business deal took place in 1994 and since then there have been billions of dealings.

Later in 1998 DSL was launched into the market that provided much faster access and persistent connection to the internet. A major merger, in early 2000, between AOL and Time Warner was another major push for electronic commerce. The merger, worth $350 million, brought together a major online company with a traditional company. In February 2000 hackers attacked some major players of E-Commerce, including Yahoo, eBay and Amazon. In light of these attacks the need for improved security in the development of electronic commerce

As the websites grew the importance of internet today is thousands of times what it was only a decade ago. E-Commerce is a new form of business that has developed rapidly. It provides a different mode of doing business that helps reduce labour cost and much faster transaction

An example of E-commerce success and it causes

E-commerce is defined as “the sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks”. It also includes various processes within and outside the organization in addition to buying and selling activities.

Generally, there are some rules for a successful e-commerce website. First of all, the retailer has a product or products that meet the customer need. After that, the retailer needs to use the website to advertise the product and make the website as attractive as possible, displays the product to best advantage.

For online payment systems and credit card processing, the retailer must ensure that customers feel secure in the online transaction. It is because customers are very concern about the level of security when providing sensitive information online and will use e-commerce only when they develop a certain level of trust. So the retailer must ensure the transaction is fully secured and no unauthorized access. The retailer makes it easy for customers to purchase products by using the credit card or e-banking systems.

The success case of e-commerce is bookseller

www.ABE.com , with no venture capital, is presently

slaughtering the VC-funded S.F. ABE.com did a lot of things right on the web, they put up a simple, user-friendly web site that delivered what the customers wanted, a good selection of used books at good prices.

But they did even more things right at the back end. For example, they left the books right where they were, sitting in low-rent used bookstore space. Alibris took possession of the books, piling up warehouse rental costs, labor costs, and doubling their shipping costs. ABE.com acted modestly, an appropriate stance in the quiet world of used bookselling. Alibris spend money with splashy advertisements in New Yorker magazine. ABE.com went out of their way to accommodate computer-illiterate used booksellers, by accepting inventory data in virtually any format. And not least, ABE.com answered the telephone, and they were pleasant to customers and suppliers alike.

As a conclusion, E-commerce success is not so easy, it need a clear vision and goal, patient and long-term view and embrace technology and change.

An example (pets.com) of an E-commerce failure and its cause

Today, businessmen are expending their business through internet in order to compete with their competitor. Businesses often rely on the Web to attract clients, communicate with suppliers, and generate revenues. As a result, the cost of failed online transactions can be significant even a single hour of downtime could cost a retailer thousands of dollars in lost sales. The use of the internet and web to transact business is called E-commerce. E-commerce had brought success to most of the businessman. However, there are also some failures. Now, let us look at some causes of failure in E-commerce and a real world example.

Causes of failures in E-commerce
The causes of failures in E-commerce can divide into four categories namely: software failures, operator error, hardware failures, and security violations. Software failure is failures occur during routine maintenance, software upgrades and system integration. Operator error occurs when the operator either omits an action or executes an incorrect action during system maintenance. Other than that, a hardware failure is also one of causes of E-commerce failure. It can occur for several reasons, for example, wear and tear of mechanical parts and loose wiring. Besides, some common security violations that occur in websites are password disclosures, Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, worms and viruses and theft.

A real life example
Pets.com (1998-2000) The important dot-com lesson was that advertising, never able to give pet owners a persuasive reason to buy pet online. Afteno matter how clever, cannot save you. Pets.com was r they ordered a pet, a customer had to wait a few days to actually get it. Moreover, because the company had to undercharge for shipping costs to attract customers, it actually lost money on most of the items it sold.

As a conclusion, all of the relailer need to enhance their operation and maintenance in order to prevent failure and become success in E-commerce.