Electronic Commerce Essay Example for Free

Electronic Commerce Essay Introduction: E-Commerce is basically using the Internet to either buy or sell goods and it has been revolutionizing the way business is controlled. In recent times Internet has evolved so huge it has lead to development of lots of new web based technologies one of them, which is most used, is E-Commerce [1]. Online shopping is an example for the most used forms of e-commerce, which companies like Amazon or eBay offer. E-Commerce in Modern Business: Nowadays businesses that do not have an EC model have started adapting automating all the manual operations overriding it by e-commerce, since every person would want to save time and money, and these 2 factors are very important in a person’s life. Consider a person who wants to purchase a laptop, he does need to go to a store physically to buy it, he can buy it online within minutes, the laptop company would already have an online shopping website, the person can just browse for available laptops which contains all the information regarding the product right from color, weight, configuration, hardware and software’s, best part is he can also change the configuration online as he wants. Few companies offering online shopping are Dell, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and many more. EC gives the people the added advantage to compare various products with one-click, they can either buy or sell their products. Usually sometimes people might not find all the brands in one particular store and now since EC has evolved to an extent where most of the brands offer online shopping a person is not limited to a geography and also M-commerce which is basically using wireless devices or handheld devices to do online transactions. M-commerce has been growing exponentially over the years. Smartphones is the new trend, people started creating Apps for their business, which can be accessed through mobiles, everyone can easily use the App on their smartphone to buy food, clothes, book flight/train/bus/cab etc. It is more  like people can buy anything from the device on the go if they have Internet [1]. E-Commerce in Social Media: Social media has really changed the way we communicate it has replaced all the old age types of communications like writing post cards or letters. Internet has a big role in this change; people use social platforms like Messages, Watsapp, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook for communicating. Many people have still have a doubt how would social media increase the sales of a business. It is simple since almost everyone uses some kind of social networking platform for communicating; these platforms really bring awareness, they showcase daily deals as advertisements, people can keep a tab on the latest products releasing from a brand, business use celebrities to endorse their brands, customers can directly interact on these platforms with others and can discuss the plus or minus of a product or a service [2]. So businesses can setup up an advertisement on a website or social platform to promote their product. Feature for a person or business to promote a product or service ranging from 5$ per day to 100$ per day, based on the payment the audience for the advertisements will be higher. Most of the social networking platforms make money through advertisements. LinkedIn one more social platform for professionals where people from various companies meet and greet each other, participate in technical or non-technical discussions, but one feature where e-commerce is involved in LinkedIn is, it offers a premium profile for users in which a person will have access to apply for more number of jobs and recruiters have full access to post a new job, search for people who need a job or who are considering a job change. This way EC has a very important role in social media too. International Barriers for Success of EC: 3 International Barriers to EC which and their role in EC’s success, one of them is no limitation to Geography. In an e-commerce model when the website  offers shipping to not only domestic places but also internationally, it really helps increase the revenue [3]. Consider a product like Cordless Warming Tray, which is available in America but not available in countries like India, so if anyone wants it, buying the product is easy, any person can purchase the item online through Amazon and enter his/her international address for shipping. E-commerce websites also offer an option for faster shipping if the person needs a product immediately for which the person should pay a little more for the shipping costs. Business are now seeing the opportunities in international markets and have started their business setup’s in those countries, like Amazon did in India recently investing 2 Billions dollars and Uber too a cab service business which is based out of America also started its business in India and few other countries. Success of EC can be calculated here by the increase in revenue from international markets. Only few companies are offering this kind of non-limitation to geography like Amazon, Barnes and Noble etc. Organizations that only offer shipping fewer countries include The Limited, J-Crew and few others. Second type of international barrier is language, considering most of them speak English there might be a section of people who do not speak, read or write English. So to offer e-commerce for those people or to those areas/countries e-commerce websites started adapting their software or website in such a way that a user who has no knowledge of English would be able to search for any product he wants without the need to type in English, he would be able to do it in his own mother tongue and the price of the product is shown in various currencies which would help buyers to easily compare the price. In this type of barrier the number of users base for each company increases which ultimately increases the revenue too. Since now EC model would not only have customers from places who speak, read or write English but also from places where they can use their local language to buy or sell goods, this is very healthy in the EC model. Third type of barrier is for a successful EC model is Legal battle and Infrastructure, as we talked about no limitations to geography and language, so when a company sets up a EC model in different countries the first and foremost thing they will need to comply with is the legal rules of that particular country. Following the rules and regulations legally would really help a company offering EC to run their business smoothly without any issues or hiccups. There have been lots of issues for few companies offering EC in various countries, consider Facebook which is a most used social platform all over the world had to fight for legality issues in few countries since people’s information was visible for everyone. One more example would be Google Earth, which faced a lot of criticism and legal issues and is now banned in India, since it was very helpful for some organizations, which are under the radar of military forces. There are success stories like Amazon, EBay and many more who have been successfully doing their business in different countries. These companies have setup their websites domain separately for each country. Like www.amazon.com is used globally, www.amazon.au is used in Australia, www.amazon.in is used in India, these sites have their own infrastructure setup to control the load of users. Since EC systems should be available 24*7 for them to gain the users reliability and confidence also because users are all across the globe they cannot afford to lose business, they need to have their website up and running all the time. To establish that they need to have heavy configurations, storage and network bandwidths and a team of technical experts who would have the capability to stop hackers from attacking their websites and access risk management techniques well before anything unusual happens. To sum up EC has been growing and will be growing exponentially in today’s and tomorrow’s business, since the ease of doing business has become very easy and as discussed time and money are important which can be saved from EC. Social media the main way of communicating with each other has also benefited from EC in a big way, since billions of users use this platform the revenue generated from the social media advertisements has made some of the start up companies like Google and Facebook to grow from a small scale companies to one of the biggest branded company and revenue generating companies all over the world. The international barriers have also as discussed added up to the success of EC. There might be limitations to EC like security issues and protecting the website or software from hackers but  it all depends on the organization on who attentive they are, how good their staff is in preventing such kind of attacks from happening. REFERENCES: [1] Turban, E, King, D (2012). Electronic commerce 2012: A managerial and social networks perspective, (7th ed.). Prentice Hall, New Jersey, USA. [2] R. T. Wigand, (1997), â€Å"Electronic commerce: Definition, theory, and context,† The Information Society, vol.13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, New York, USA. [3] Farhoomand, AF; Tuunainen, VK; Yee, LW, (2000), â€Å"Barriers to global electronic Commerce: A cross-country study of Hong Kong and Finland, vol. 10 n. 1, p. 1-40, Hong Kong.