Electronic business

Ebusiness is a term used to describe businesses run on the Internet, or utilizing Internet technologies to improve the productivity or profitability of a business. In a more general sense, the term may be used to describe any form of electronic business - that is to say, any business which utilizes a computer ebusiness is referred to as ecommerce, and the terms are occasionally used interchangeably.

Electronic commerce

e-commerce is the delivery of information ,product or sevices or payments via telephone lines, computer networks E-commerce is the application of technology towards the automation of business transactions and business workflows. Broadly speaking eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage.

History

Originally, electronic commerce was identified as the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. Another form of e-commerce was the airline reservation system typified by Sabre in the USA and Travicom in the UK.

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From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the WorldWideWeb web browser and transformed an academic telecommunication network into a worldwide everyman everyday communication system called internet/www. Commercial enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited until 1991.

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Although the Internet became popular worldwide around 1994 when the first internet online shopping started, it took about five years to introduce security protocols and DSL allowing continual connection to the Internet. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) is a family of technologies that provides digital data transmission over the wires of a local telephone network By the end of 2000, many European and American business companies offered their services through the World Wide Web. Since then people began to associate a word "ecommerce" with the ability of purchasing various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.

Forces fueling e-commerce

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There are at least three major forces fueling ecommerce: economic forces, marketing and customer interaction forces, technology, particularly multimedia convergence

Economic forces

One of the most evident benefits of e-commerce is economic efficiency resulting from the reduction in communications costs, low-cost technological infrastructure, speedier and more economic electronic transactions with suppliers, lower global information sharing and advertising costs, and cheaper customer service alternatives. Economic integration is either external or internal. External integration refers to the electronic networking of corporations, suppliers, customers/clients, and independent contractors into one community communicating in a virtual environment (with the Internet as medium).

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2. Internal integration, on the other hand, is the networking of the various departments within a corporation, and of business operations and processes. This allows critical business information to be stored in a digital form that can be retrieved instantly and transmitted electronically. Internal integration is best exemplified by corporate intranets. Among the companies with efficient corporate intranets are Procter and Gamble, IBM, Nestle and Intel.

Market forces

Corporations are encouraged to use e-commerce in marketing and promotion to capture international markets, both big and small. The Internet is likewise used as a medium for enhanced customer service and support. It is a lot easier for companies to provide their target consumers with more detailed product and service information using the Internet.

Technology forces

technological advances in digitizing content, compression and the promotion of open systems technology have paved the way for the convergence of communication services into one single platform. This in turn has made communication more efficient, faster, easier, and more economical as the need to set up separate networks for telephone services, television broadcast, cable television, and Internet access is eliminated. From the standpoint of firms/businesses and consumers, having only one information provider means lower communications costs.

E-commerce Industry Framework

Basic Framework
The First layer: Network Infrastructure Also known as the Information Superhighway, network infrastructure is the foundation layer of hardware infrastructure. It is a mixture of many forms of information transport systems, which include telecom, cable TV, wireless and the Internet. These systems, in particular the Internet, provide various types of telecommunication channels for transmission of contents used in e-commerce.

The Second Layer: Multimedia Content and Network Publishing

While the Information Superhighway is the transportation basis that allows content such as text, sounds and images to be transmitted, the second layer provides an architecture that enables the content to be developed in a programming language know as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) for publishing on the World Wide Web (WWW). Another programming language in use is Java, which enables multimedia content to be transmitted to end users personal computers via various networks such as cable, wireless, fiber optics and satellites.

The Third layer: Messaging and Information Dissemination

Messaging transmission is usually done by the following technologies: Communicating non-formatted data: by using facsimile, electronic mail, which mainly directs to individuals. Communicating formatted data: by using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) without human intervention. It is mainly used for business documents such as purchase orders, invoices and packing lists. Messaging transmission technology has encouraged business process automation. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP): HTTP is an information dissemination tool generally used on the Internet. It uses a common display format to publish non-formatted multimedia messages in various environments. Uniform Resource Locator (URL): URL is at present used by many web surfers to search for information.

The Fourth layer: Security Protection in Business Services

This layer is regarded as the essential facilities for doing business because it is required by both business corporations and individuals in business transactions. The facilities include standardized product catalogues, price lists, electronic payment methods, secured transmission of business information, and the authentication of identity of both trading parties. The ultimate goal of e-commerce is that the seller gets the payment and the buyer obtains the product. To ensure transaction security, ecommerce needs to ensure content reliability, integrity, non-repudiation, and to provide the relevant evidence in case of disputes. Therefore, payment security on the web is crucial to ensure smooth completion of a transaction. The prevailing method of security measure is by electronic certification which provides end-to-end security protection.

The Fifth layer: Practical Application of E-commerce

E-commerce is widely employed in supply chain management, electronic marketing, electronic advertising, online shopping, online entertainment, pay-information service and network banking. The Last Word The application of e-commerce has promoted business globalization. Consumers can easily obtain products from other countries via the Internet. This has given rise to issues such as custom clearance and payment of duties. Different countries have different systems and conditions, which may contradict with the cross-border nature of e-commerce. Therefore, international collaboration to develop associated policies and regulations is vital. Crippling laws and regulations will hamper the development of e-commerce.