Essay on E-commerce

Essay by harsha83 May 2004

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E - Commerce; a Brief Overview

In today's unpredictable, ever changing market, where many businesses, from small entrepreneurs to giant corporations, with the help of technology development, have been looking forward for other business alternatives in order to enhance their productivities as well as profitability. The most preferable alternative is by implementing Electronic Commerce as part of their business activities. Firstly, let us define what E-commerce is. According to Turban et al (2000), e-commerce is an emerging concept that describes the process of buying and selling or exchanging of products, services, and information via computer networks including the Internet. On the other hand, McLeod, Jr. (1998) defines electronic commerce as the use of computer to facilitate all of the firm's operations.

Every era of business yields new strategies and new ways of doing business. With the introduction of radio and television came the first mass-market advertising. Now, the Internet has so radically changed business that the rules for corporate strategy that held for the last 50 years (since the dawn of television) have begun to fall apart.

There are some elements of commerce that are necessary for any transactions to take place, which should be available for regular bricks-and-mortar commerce as well as for e-commerce. First, whether a firm is doing business online or in the real world, it must have a product to sell or a service to offer. Then, the place from where to do business should be considered. In the conventional world of commerce this can be a physical store. In the world of e-commerce the place to do business is the Web site.

Most businesses already exist in the bricks-and-mortar world of commerce. Adding a Web site is a mean to enhance their business. For Internet startups, the Web site is the only place that...