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ECommerce
By: Mary Anne Winslow
We are living in the world of fast developing and growing new technologies and inventions. On one hand they make our life easier and more comfortable in all aspect and spheres of human activity. On the other side it is sometimes hard to follow all the new inventions the world has to offer. However if one does not watch and participate in the process of new developments he easily gets lost and falls out of normal life. In the good old days, business was pretty simple. I had a pig, you had some wool; we showed up at the market and haggled, then I went home to knit a cardigan while you cooked up some BBQ. Nowadays we don't have to show up at the market, and we don't even need physical goods or currency to conduct business. Electronic commerce is the most recent step in the evolution of business transactions. It replaces the swapping of money or goods with the exchange of information from computer to computer.
Computer today is not only for the communication of people but also for business. Internet is the tool used by business in term of electronic commerce. In the paper I will try to state how e-commerce influences business in the new world with the fast growing of the Internet technology and how the economics of E-Commerce works.
Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, is a very broad term. E-commerce made between businesses is different from that carried out between a business and its consumers. For business-to-consumer e-commerce, the Web has become the dominant gateway. Amazon.com, the company offers lots of books for sale on its Web site. People find what they like, type in their credit card number and unpack the books a few days later. Making individual stock trades, moving money from checking to savings or tracking an overnight package delivery via the Internet are other examples. Simply, electronic commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services, and the transfer of funds through digital communications. Business-to-business e-commerce takes many forms, some of which have been around for years. Electronic data interchange (EDI) is a format for exchanging business information over private networks. It was created to computerize and speed the exchange of information between companies that regularly did business together. For example, on Tuesday your computer can automatically tell my computer that you've shipped the computers I ordered. Then on Wednesday my computer acknowledges your shipping confirmation and tells you that I'll mail you a check on Thursday. No money actually changed hands electronically here but a lot of business data did. If your business and my business do transactions like this often, the computerized system beats having our clerks stand by the fax machine every day and then retype the information they receive into our computer systems.
EDI is still used, and there are many other mechanisms for business interaction, such as electronic catalogs and electronic payment systems. The Web plays an expanding role just as it does in consumer e-commerce. For example, you might let your office-supply provider put an ordering page on your intranet.
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