Chapter 1

Overview of Electronic Commerce

Learning
• Why is EC needed?
• When did it appear, what are the necessary conditions for
existence?
• What are the limitations of EC?
1. Why is EC needed?
A. Enterprise

B. Consumers

C. Society
A.Enterprise
 A.Enterprise
• For businesses, e-commerce creates favorable conditions for businesses to
promote their brand image, products and services to customers and partners.
• The next benefit of e-commerce for businesses is to save costs and facilitate
transactions between parties. Businesses will not need to spend money to
rent a store or to hire service staff or rent a warehouse. Just start the cost for
the website and sell online, you will only need about 10% of the capital
compared to renting a store, labor, and warehouse to operate the website
every month.
• Having an e-commerce website, you will expand the scope of your business
much more simply. Not in the province, in the country, but maybe even
globally if you do good marketing. With the traditional business opening a
store, it is extremely difficult, only e-commerce can do. The cost is also not
too high to be able to introduce your business to another market.
B. Consumers
 B. Consumers
• Save time to go shopping, just sitting at home, surfing the web with your
phone or computer can help you choose the right item.
• You can freely check products, choose items, compare prices and quality
between places.
• There are people who deliver goods to the door without losing effort to carry
them from the store to the house.
C. Society
 C. Society
• For society, e-commerce will create a new and modern way of doing
business and working, more suitable for the rapidly developing market trend
in the 4.0 technology era.
• E-commerce will also create a new playground for businesses and require
them to grasp and innovate business methods, creating opportunities for
higher competition. Thereby promoting the development of businesses in
particular and the economy in general.
2. When did it appear, what are the necessary
conditions for existence?
1969 - CompuServe was founded
1979
1982- Boston Computer Exchange Launched
1994-Netscape Navigator Launches as a Web Browser
1995-Amazon and Ebay launch
1998-PayPal launches as an e-commerce payment system
1999-Alibaba launched
Conditions
A.Training human resources for e-commerce
B.Internet technical infrastructure
C.Legal infrastructure
D.Logistics infrastructure
E.Improved automatic financial payment system
F.Protect consumers
3. What are the limitations of
EC?
3.Limitations of EC

i. Technical Limitations:
• System security, reliability and standards
• Insufficient telecommunication bandwidth
• Vendors may need special Web server and other
infrastructures in addition to the network server
• Some EC software might not fit some hardware, or may
be incompatible with some operating systems
3.Limitations of EC

I. Non-technical Limitations:
• Security and privacy
• Lack of trust and user resistance
• Legal issues such as copyright
• Accessibility to internet may be expensive