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Table of Contents
What is e-Commerce?
E-commerce also known as Electronic Commerce, refers to buying and selling of products or services over the Internet. Normally e-commerce is used to refer to the sale of physical products online, but it can also describe any kind of commercial transaction that is facilitated through the internet.
E-Commerce or Electronics Commerce is a methodology of modern business, which addresses the need of business organizations, vendors and customers to reduce cost and improve the quality of goods and services while increasing the speed of delivery.
Ecommerce refers to the paperless exchange of business information using the following ways −
- Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
- Electronic Mail (e-mail)
- Electronic Bulletin Boards
- Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)
- Other Network-based technologies
What are the features of E-commerce?
E-Commerce provides the following features −
- Non-Cash Payment − E-Commerce enables the use of credit cards, debit cards, smart cards, electronic fund transfer via bank’s website, and other modes of electronics payment.
- 24×7 Service availability − E-commerce automates the business of enterprises and the way they provide services to their customers. It is available anytime, anywhere.
- Advertising / Marketing − E-commerce increases the reach of advertising of products and services of businesses. It helps in better marketing management of products/services.
- Improved Sales − Using e-commerce, orders for the products can be generated anytime, anywhere without any human intervention. It gives a big boost to existing sales volumes.
- Support − E-commerce provides various ways to provide pre-sales and post-sales assistance to provide better services to customers.
- Inventory Management − E-commerce automates inventory management. Reports get generated instantly when required. Product inventory management becomes very efficient and easy to maintain.
- Communication improvement − E-commerce provides ways for faster, efficient, reliable communication with customers and partners.
What are the advantages of E-commerce?
- E-commerce enables fast and secure shopping.
- It is making digitalized world.
- E-commerce also enables to choose different goods and services according to your choice.
- It is a simple way of selling and buying products and services.
- E-commerce replaced the paper work as all transactions are through internet today.
- It provides better management system, as it has a centralized database.
- E-commerce via internet covers a large number of customers worldwide.
What are the dis-advantages of E-commerce?
- E-commerce has no universal standard for quality and reliability.
- E-commerce works through internet, it is possible that navigation on internet itself may be slow.
- Strong security is required in e-commerce as all transactions are through internet.
- There is high risk of buying unsatisfactory products through e-commerce.
- It uses public key infrastructure which is not safe.
- Customers also trap in banking fraud which is quite frequent.
- Hackers also try to get access of data or to destroy data in e-commerce.
