E-commerce Websites For Small Businesses
Electronic Commerce (more commonly known as eCommerce or
e-commerce) involves the buying and selling of products
and/or services over electronic systems such as the Internet
or other computer networks. Since the introduction of the
Internet, the amount of trade being done electronically
presented a steady growth increase that instigated the
emergence of eCommerce.
Electronic or e in the word eCommerce refers to the
electronic technology and electronic systems used, while
commerce refers to the traditional business market models.
It is the complete set of procedures that sustains
commercial business activities on a network.
eCommerce includes electronic fund transfers, supply chain
management, online transaction processing, internet
marketing, electronic data interchange or EDI, automated
data collection systems, and automated inventory management
systems. The World Wide Web has become a vast platform for
electronic commerce since it will at least at some point
pass through the use of the Internet during the lifestyle of
a single transaction.
Historically, eCommerce meant the facilitation of commercial
transactions electronically by using technologies like
Electronic Data Interchange or Electronic Fund Transfer.
These were integral parts of the technologies that emerged
during the late 1970s. These technologies were used to send
commercial documents such as invoices or purchase orders
electronically.
During these times, eCommerce also involved information
analysis, which is mainly the summation of the transactions
processed within a certain period of time. It was also
during the 1980s that the utilization and favorable
reception of credit cards, telephone banking and Automated
Teller Machines or the ATMs by consumers initially started
to rapidly grow.
The Boston Computer Exchange, launched in 1982, was one of
the earliest examples of eCommerce maximizing the use of
multiple electronic stations. In 1992, the American
Information Exchange launched the first online information
marketplace, which also served as online consultants.
Today, the concept of eCommerce has evolved and has been
revolutionized. eCommerce transactions now include
enterprise resource planning systems, data mining, and data
warehousing. eCommerce encompasses a very wide scope of
business activities, transactions, and processes. These
processes range from eBanking and off-shore
industrialization to eLogistics. It is now said to be more
precisely regarded as Web Commerce. The growth of eCommerce
also led to the development of a lot of supporting systems
for the growing industry such as broadband networks, fibre-optic
networks, customer relationship management software,
supply-chain management software, inventory control systems,
and financial accounting software.
The strong emergence of eCommerce on the World Wide Web has
also considerably lowered entry barriers when it comes to
marketing many types of goods. With the use of the Internet,
products have reached global presence and made it easier for
business to cater their products since customers are able to
reach them in more ways – email, instant message, websites,
blogs etc.
In line with this, many small home-based businesses are able
to use the Internet to sell their goods and services.
Usually, small sellers make use of online auction websites
like eBay, or sell through large corporate websites such as
Amazon.com in order to benefit from the exposure and setup
expediency of such sites.
Although the most commonly sold items over the Internet are
digital products and services, most virtual marketers can
sell non-digital products and services depending on their
value-to-weight ratio. These include items that may usually
fit in a standard letter box such as books, CDs and DVDs.
Amazon.Com has traditionally concentrated on selling items
in this field.
Another set of good items to sell online is spare parts of
any industrial equipment. This is because retailers rarely
stock spare parts at their consumer outlets. Pornography and
other sex-related products and services have unsurprisingly
become the most lucrative segment of eCommerce.
Although eCommerce is accepted by many in general, one of
its many disadvantages includes fraud. Fraud has given
eCommerce’s ill reputation, and this has been hard to break.
Fraud comes in the form of providing financial and personal
information that is used to purposely steal money, create
transactions without your knowledge, or commit more
fraudulent activities.
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