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.

Continue.

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.

Continue

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

1.
2.
3.

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.

1.

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).

Continue.
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, e-commerce 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, payinformation 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 ecommerce. Therefore, international collaboration to
develop associated policies and regulations is vital.
Crippling laws and regulations will hamper the
development of e-commerce.