What Can E-commerce do?

E-commerce is becoming more and more popular. Businesses are all trying to get their products online. More and more consumers shift themselves to online trading. Why are these happening?! Below are some points regarding this issue.


1st: Reduce cycle time
By having an e-commerce website, business can operate 24 hours. This can reduce unnecessary mailings and phone calls from customers and to suppliers. Besides, by eliminating middle man, businesses now can sell directly to their customers. This can reduce both the transportation time in between producer, middle man and consumers, and also the profit margin of a particular product! Workflow automation can eliminate the traditional way of order processing which consumed a lot of time. Nowadays, shipping, stock level, stock site, and payment verification are all done automatically in real time!

2nd: Improve employees’ empowerment
Employees who are working with e-commerce technology are normally self-managed. They have the authority to made decisions as they do not have a direct superior supervising them. Moreover, some employees even have the permission to maintain or setting up a creative website for the company. Besides, companies also empowered their workers to response to customers’ enquiries (email) without having to report to their manager. With the database, intranet and extranet, employees have more authority to access to corporate information as compare to those old days.

3rd: Facilitate customer support
With an e-commerce website, companies can now provide their customers a more advance customer support system. For example, most corporate websites provide online FAQ (frequent asked questions) section as a self-help customer support. If the customer cannot find his answer in the FAQ, he can also send an email to the contact link that is posted on the website. Normally these emails will be answered in a short period. Besides, some websites will also have their companies’ hotline posted on their websites. Customers may call the hotline and be served by the operator.

The Evolution of E-commerce

What will appear in your mind when people mentioned about e-commerce? Most of our answers will be online trading, online transactions or others similar answers. However, did anyone know that originally e-commerce was only used for commercial transactions between companies using EDI and EFT?

In the late 1970s, EDI and EFT were introduced, allowing companies to electronically transfer their commercial documents such as purchase orders and invoices. Later, when the use of credit cards, ATM and telephone banking became popular in the 1980s, the e-commerce technology evolved and involved more financial based transactions. However, at this stage, e-commerce was used mainly for B2B transactions.

From 1990s onwards, e-commerce has additionally included ERP, data mining and data warehousing. At the same time, e-commerce has become more popular among the general public. Between 1998 and 2000, many businesses in United State and Western Europe have developed their own website. By this stage, B2C transactions are being introduced to the public when big companies started to offer their products and services on the World Wide Web.

Some examples for the early adopters of e-commerce are:

• Pizza Hut (1994) http://www.pizzahut.com/

  

• Amazon.com (1995) http://www.amazon.com/
  
  

  

• Dell (1995) http://www.dell.com/

• eBay (1995) http://www.ebay.com/
  
  

  

Nowadays, e-commerce has become more and more acceptable to the public and more forms of business transactions such as B2B, B2C, C2B, C2C are created, and being widely used by the public and companies.