The Role Of Ecommerce

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

The title of the journal we chose is "E-Commerce: Role of E-Commerce in Today’s Business" and it describes the type of e-commerce. Today’s online business activities include business-to-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-government, consumer-to-consumer, and mobile commerce. There are also many advantages and disadvantages to this trade. The main reason we choose this journal is because we have interest about it and we also want to learn more about what is e-commerce because this will help us in others assignments. This journal is from www.visualsoftindia.com/journal.html and the authors are Hitesh Khurana, Major Kr. Goel, Hardeep Singh and Leena Bhutani. It was published by VSRD-IJBMR, Vol.1 (7), 2011, 4s54-461.

Summary

E-commerce means a broad range of business transaction through the internet. This transaction does not refer to any direct physical contact between buyers and sellers, all the activities are usually done in the network. E-commerce either is a transaction between organizations or between organizations and individuals in the ICT (information and communications technology) while in e-business ICT is use to improve one’s business. This involves any process in the computer-mediated network carried out by business organizations. E-commerce is mainly separate into 5 types. Firstly, the business-to-business (B2B) refer to e-commerce that interact between organizations. Secondly, the business to consumers (B2C) means e-commerce activities between companies and consumers. Consumer can make purchasing decisions over the network and find particular information over the website. Besides, we also have business-to-government e-commerce (B2G). This is commerce between companies and the public sectors. Next is the consumer-to-consumer e-commerce (C2C). This is defined as commerce among private individuals or consumers. Lastly, the M-commerce (mobile commerce) is transactions through smart phones and personal digital assistance (PDA). There are few types of industries affected by e-commerce; they are financial services that include mobile banking and brokerage services, telecommunication where service charge and bill payment can be conducted with the handheld device and finally information service. The information can be updated using a single mobile device. These 5 types of e-commerce mentioned above have several benefits, that is the transaction cost is reduce, the cost of processing transaction is reduced and lastly inventory management and logistics improve in online process.

Critique Thinking

According to the journal, it state that almost 80% of e-commerce is B2B e-commerce and forecast B2B e-commerce will develop fast compared to others e-commerce portion. We partially agree with this statement because improvement of the wireless technology use in M-commerce nowadays. We cannot deny that B2B e-commerce generate a large revenue than others in the past few years. This is because in a typical supply chain, there will be many transaction including raw materials and sub-component. There is only one transaction in B2C e-commerce which is sale of the finished goods to the end customer. An automobile manufacturer makes several B2B e-commerce transaction such as buying tires, wiring and glasses for making a vehicle but only a transaction happened in B2C, which is when the finished vehicle is sold to consumer. However, we feel that high percentage of B2B e-commerce in the total e-commerce will decrease in the near future because of M-commerce. The development of the smart phones & tablet in this few years encourage M-commerce to keep growing. M-commerce enables business events carry out more convenient, short, anytime & anywhere as we can access the internet. There are many products and services available from M-commerce such as mobile purchase, mobile banking and mobile browsing. According to BI Intelligence in January 2013, 29% of mobile users made a purchase using their phones. Apple Company makes huge profit through App Store that provide their IPhones & Ipad users variety of application for their users to purchase. This will save the mailing costs of catalogue to consumer. B2B e-commerce can form an electronic exchange to join with the competitors and supplier using M-commerce to purchase and sale goods. We can conclude that M-commerce benefit for both producer & consumer and it will continue develop as an important element for business activities.

From this journal, there are several advantages such as transaction costs, disintermediation, and transparency in pricing. However, we absolutely agree that e-commerce also has its disadvantages. We think that the disadvantages are that consumer will face dilemma whenever they reveal one-man information online especially when transaction occurs. This is because consumers fear that their private information will be used in improper ways as they don’t know whether the company is a legitimate business or fraud. Besides that, e-commerce does not allow consumers to experience the commodity before they want to buy it. In some ways, e-commerce purchases are made upon trust. This means consumer would not be allowed to test the commodity before having the intention to purchase it and they are worried whether it will ever arrive even though the item is sent to them. There are some commodities that consumers will not purchase online like perishable items. The time for delivering of such items will take a lot of time to reach customers’ address. Moreover, consumers also face the problem in returning commodity. When they are not satisfied with a certain commodity, it is hard to return their commodity to the shop because they have never met the shopkeeper. In addition, the price of commodity which buys through e-commerce will be higher than the price of commodity by using conventional method. This is because there are many types of intermediaries are essential to e-commerce and all these intermediaries will add to the transaction costs.

In order to make the e-commerce successful, we strongly agree that there must carry out several strategic to overcome the disadvantages of e-commerce. One of the disadvantages of e-commerce is customer can’t test the products because products are not tangible and only exists as a picture on the website. Purchase online also very difficult and impossible to return. Unlike when purchasing at a store traditionally, customer can test and know all the information before they make transaction. Customers are afraid they will buy wrong products because items are maybe not actually same as what they want. So, we suggest sellers can overcome this problem by putting more information about the products at website with the aim to show it clearly. Sellers can take pictures from multiple angles and place some videos of the product to introduce it specification at website. Sellers may also provide a space at website for user to write their feedbacks and rating. This will help others customers to make a good decisions before transactions are made. Sellers should allow customer to return products if they cannot find a perfect fit. Furthermore, most of the consumer feels e-commerce is dishonest and not trustworthy because internet is not a secure environment. They afraid their information such as credit card number and password will divulge to hackers. So, sellers should find a solution to make their customers confident with the e-commerce business by select a hosting service very carefully, the platform must be encrypted and password protected or else someone could just hack into the database and steal vital information. The password that use must be quiet and difficult to crack and don’t put the general password like abcde, 123456, iloveu and so on. The server must also backup the data that store online to prevent the loss of data in case of the system crashes. The language used in e-commerce also is a problem. The whole world is using different types of languages respectively. Sellers must provide more than one language on the website to let more customers understand information on the website by choose their prefer language. E-commerce website should also have currency converter option, along with metric or imperial size measurements depending on the requirements.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we obtained a lot of information on the "E-commerce". Although there are many disadvantages but we strongly agree that the advantages will overcome it. E-commerce will be more popular nowadays. Business owners or any enterprise will be using it in the future.