The New Nation - Internet Edition

Muhammad Azizur Rahman

Recently Bangladesh joins e-commerce development. Now it's a popular system for not only Bangladesh also all around the world. We know lots of website that's success to establish their business by e - commerce technology. Here I try to discus about e -commerce and its activities.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or 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 dramatically since the wide introduction of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, including things such as electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well. E commerce is a new technology.

A small percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for "virtual" items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce eventually involves physical items and their transportation in at least some way.

E-commerce or electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business.

History

Early signification

The meaning of the term "electronic commerce" has changed over the last 30 years. Originally, "electronic commerce" meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, usually using technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), where both were introduced in the late 1970s, for example, to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically.

The 'electronic' or 'e' in e-commerce refers to the technology/systems; the 'commerce' refers to traditional business models. E-commerce is the complete set of processes that support commercial business activities on a network. In the 1970s and 1980s, this would also have involved information analysis. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of e-commerce. However, from the 1990s onwards, this would include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing. Perhaps the earliest example of many-to-many electronic commerce in physical goods was the Boston Computer Exchange, a marketplace for used computers, launched in 1982. The first online information marketplace, including online consulting, was likely the American Information Exchange, another pre-Internet online system, introduced in 1991.

Activities

In the dot com era, it came to include activities more precisely termed "Web commerce" -- the purchase of goods and services over the World Wide Web, usually with secure connections (HTTPS, a special server protocol that encrypts confidential ordering data for customer protection) with e-shopping carts and with electronic payment services, like credit card payment authorizations.

Today, it encompasses a very wide range of business activities and processes, from e-banking to offshore manufacturing to e-logistics. The ever growing dependence of modern industries on electronically enabled business processes gave impetus to the growth and development of supporting systems, including backend systems, applications and middleware. Examples are broadband and fibre-optic networks, supply-chain management software, customer relationship management software, inventory control systems and financial accounting software.

Web development

When the Web first became well-known among the general public in 1994, many journalists and pundits forecast that e-commerce would soon become a major economic sector. However, it took about four years for security protocols (like HTTPS) to become sufficiently developed and widely deployed. Subsequently, between 1998 and 2000, a substantial number of businesses in the United States and Western Europe developed rudimentary web sites. Although a large number of "pure e-commerce" companies disappeared during the dot-com collapse in 2000 and 2001, many "brick-and-mortar" retailers recognized that such companies had identified valuable niche markets and began to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites. For example, after the collapse of online grocer Webvan, two traditional supermarket chains, Albertsons and Safeway, both started e-commerce subsidiaries through which consumers could order groceries online.

The emergence of e-commerce also significantly lowered barriers to entry in the selling of many types of goods; accordingly many small home-based proprietors are able to use the internet to sell goods. Often, small sellers use online auction sites such as eBay, or sell via large corporate websites like Amazon.com, in order to take advantage of the exposure and setup convenience of such sites.

$259 billion of online sales including travel are expected in 2007 in USA, a 18 percent increase from the previous year, as forecasted by the "State of Retailing Online 2007" report from the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Shop.org.[1]

Success factors

In many cases, an e-commerce company will survive not only based on its product, but by having a competent management team, good post-sales services, well-organized business structure, network infrastructure and a secured, well-designed website. A company that wants to succeed will have to perform two things: Technical and organizational aspects and customer-oriented. Following factors will make business of companies succeed in e-commerce:

Technical and organizational aspects

1. Sufficient work done in market research and analysis. E-commerce is not exempt from good business planning and the fundamental laws of supply and demand. Business failure is as much a reality in e-commerce as in any other form of business.

2. A good management team armed with information technology strategy. A company's IT strategy should be a part of the business re-design process.

3. Providing an easy and secured way for customers to effect transactions. Credit cards are the most popular means of sending payments on the internet, accounting for 90% of online purchases. In the past, card numbers were transferred securely between the customer and merchant through independent payment gateways. Such independent payment gateways are still used by most small and home businesses. Most merchants today process credit card transactions on site through arrangements made with commercial banks or credit cards companies.

4. Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.

5. Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer. However, customers may not appreciate the big brother experience.

6. Constructing a commercially sound business model.

7. Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies -- the opposite of a one-stop shop. (Electronic stores can appear as either specialist or generalist if properly programmed.)

8. Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes (but remembering that the fundamentals of commerce remain indifferent to technology).

9. Setting up an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the economic, social and physical environment.

10. Providing an attractive website. The tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage may aid success in this respect.

11. Streamlining business processes, possibly through re-engineering and information technologies.

12. Providing complete understanding of the products or services offered, which not only includes complete product information, but also sound advisors and selectors.

Naturally, the e-commerce vendor must also perform such mundane tasks as being truthful about its product and its availability, shipping reliably, and handling complaints promptly and effectively. A unique property of the Internet environment is that individual customers have access to far more information about the seller than they would find in a brick-and-mortar situation. (Of course, customers can, and occasionally do, research a brick-and-mortar store online before visiting it, so this distinction does not hold water in every case.)

(Muhammad Azizur Rahman

Freelance journalist md.azizur07.rahman@gmail.com )

Jo Best

While the news that Microsoft is developing a version of Windows for the so-called "$100 laptop" has caused some consternation, One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte has said the project could not promote openness if it blocked Windows.

Will Poole, Microsoft corporate vice president, told Reuters last week that the software giant is working on a stripped-down version of Windows XP to run on the ruggedized laptops destined for schoolchildren in developing countries. Poole was initially quoted as saying it could be ready in a few months, though Microsoft said that Poole was misquoted and that while the company is hopeful to get Windows onto the machine, much work remains.

The educational XO laptop has been built using free and open-source software-part of the One Laptop Per Child project's drive to allow XO's young users to modify the laptop's software as they see fit.

The OLPC's philosophy of openness is behind its decision to allow Microsoft software on the machines, according to Negroponte.

"It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open," Negroponte said.

According to Negroponte, the XP announcement is the latest development in a long-running collaboration between the project and Microsoft.

"Microsoft has always been working on Windows for the XO. We put the SD (secure digital) slot into our laptop over one year ago, for them," Negroponte said, explaining that the SD slot allows the XO's memory to be expanded, making it easier for users to run Windows.

Windows on XO "has not only been happening with our consent, but (also our) collaboration. Some of the first engineering models from any given build go to them," Negroponte said.

Negroponte's latest comments may anger some elements of the open-source community-an audience that he has courted extensively in his publicity drive for the XO. Speaking at Linux specialist Red Hat's annual user event in 2006, Negroponte appeared almost triumphant to have excluded Microsoft and Intel from the OLPC project.

"AMD is our partner, which means Intel is pissing on me. Bill Gates is not pleased either, but if I am annoying Microsoft and Intel then I figure I am doing something right," he said to an audience of open-source enthusiasts in Nashville.

Subsequently, Intel and OLPC teamed up and have started working together.

Negroponte added that the project required an extremely scaled-down OS to enable the eventual machines to run at a decent speed while using very little power. "About 25 percent of the cost of a laptop is there just to support XP, which is like a person that has gotten so fat that they use most of their muscle to move their fat," he said.

Despite Microsoft's involvement, OLPC remains principally an open-source project, according to Negroponte. The machines come with an operating system that uses elements of Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 and includes a browser built on XULRunner, the runtime environment used by Firefox.

Orders for around 3 million of the machines are believed to have been received to date.

Jo Best of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney. ZDNet UK's Andrew Donoghue contributed to this report.