Assignment on E-Commerce

Submitted to:
Professor Ghulam Yasin

Submitted by:
Hafiz M. Sabir 205

Hailey College of Commerce

University of the Punjab
Lahore
Definitions:

E - Commerce
Ecommerce (electronic commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services on
the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a newer term,
eBusiness, are often used interchangeably.

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 to become sufficiently
developed and widely deployed (during the browser wars of this period). 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.

E - Business
EBusiness (electronic business) is, in its simplest form, the conduct of business on the
Internet. It is a more generic term than ecommerce because it refers to not only buying
and selling but also servicing customers and collaborating with business partners.

IBM, in 1997, was one of the first to use the term when it launched a campaign built
around the term. Today, many corporations are rethinking their businesses in terms of
the Internet and its capabilities. Companies are using the Web to buy parts and supplies
from other companies, to collaborate on sales promotions, and to do joint research.
Exploiting the convenience, availability, and global reach of the Internet, many
companies, both large and small have already discovered how to use the Internet
successfully.
Features of E – commerce
If you’re an online merchant, you already understand the importance of having a
professional looking website. But do you know which ecommerce features are essential
to making your website successful at selling and managing your product long term?

As the selection of shopping cart technologies and ecommerce solution providers on

the market continues to grow and vie for your business, there are a handful of critical
features and feature-sets that you should insist upon having. While a professional and
compelling design is necessary and can “make” your business, a poor or lacking
ecommerce feature set can “break” your business just as easily.

To help you navigate the sea of competing ecommerce platforms and identify the best
solution for your business, I’ve compiled this list of top ten must-have ecommerce
features that you should be looking for (and asking questions about) as you seek a
suitable shopping cart to serve your online store.

•Search-engine Friendliness You’ll want your shopping cart solution to provide you with
control over your own title tags, Meta descriptions and keywords so that you can easily
optimize at-will for the search engines. You’ll also want your solution to automatically
generate keyword-rich URLS based on your product and category names and to
generate page code that is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant.

•PCI Compliant Hosting & Security Because your website will need to accept online
payments, you must find a provider who can host your website in a PCI (Payment Card
Industry) compliant environment. If you don’t know anything about PCI Compliance,
you’ll need to understand your role in complying with the DSS (Data Security
Standards). Currently, the card industry mandates that any merchant, organization or
software that processes, stores or disseminates credit card data must be PCI DSS
compliant or they risk hefty fines and/or losing the ability to process credit cards
altogether thus putting your entire business in jeopardy. Although there is a lot more
involved with PCI compliance than just hosting your site in a compliant environment, this
is your first step.

•Up-selling & Cross-selling Features Up-selling is offering customers a product that is of

greater value than the product they are currently considering or adding options/features
to the product they are buying in an attempt to increase their spend. Cross-selling refers
to selling items that are complementary to the item they are purchasing. Any suitable
shopping cart technology will offer automated features that can accomplish these
marketing techniques for you with some simple set-up. Make sure that your shopping
cart solution offers these valuable recommendation tools.
•Product Review Feature Product reviews are a very powerful product marketing tool. In
fact, research shows that even bad reviews help to sell more product than not showing
reviews for a product at all. You’ll want an ecommerce solution that lets you enable
customers to post reviews of the products that you sell. You can always review the
posts before you choose to display them or choose to display reviews automatically on
the website.

•Flexible Pricing Management You’ll want to find a shopping cart that offers flexible
pricing features and allows you to set-up multiple pricing options to accommodate things
like promotional pricing for any product, customer, order, or time frame, wholesale or
retail pricing (or both) displayed to your customers via the same catalog interface and
which allows you to set-up affiliate pricing, accepts coupon codes, allows for quantity-
based pricing and has tax-exempt support.

•Robust Catalog Management Identify a solution that allows you to get your store
started quickly by offering a bulk import/export of your catalog. You’ll find that this
feature will support you throughout the life-cycle of your business and not just at start-
up. Make sure that the solution also offers product cloning to simplify catalog additions,
automatic resizing of your product images and has some strong inventory management
capabilities such as letting you set minimum quantities and identify backordered items.

•Solid Analytics & Reporting Look for a solution that integrates with Google Analytics to
demonstrate real-time site and search ranking data and that offers a variety of other
product performance reporting capabilities, which you’ll need to accurately monitor your
business. Be sure that you can export and save these reports.

•Integrated Shipping You’ll want your shopping cart solution to integrate with the major
shipping providers such as USPS, UPS and Fedex and you’ll want the ability to markup
shipping rate-quotes by a percentage or by a flat amount so that you have the option to
charge transparent handling fees.

•Product Feed Support You’ll want your shopping cart solution to have a product feed
feature that will allow you to easily create a feed of your products that you can then
upload to shopping comparison sites (aka “shopping engines”) such as Shopzilla,
Shopping.com, Google Product Search, etc. and that will allow you to create multiple
product feeds for each comparison engine.

•Gift Certificate/Wishlist Features Gift Certificate and Wishlist are two website features
that play a major role in holiday sales conversions (according to a Demandware study).
64 percent of those surveyed said gift certificates equaled 25 percent of their online
purchases and half of those surveyed said they shopped using someone else's wishlist.
So, be sure to utilize these features on your site and do not consider an ecommerce
solution that does not boast a robust online gift certificate and wishlist feature-set.
Types of E- Commerce

The term e-commerce is really a "catch-all" phrase that encompasses many concepts.
To help you better understand, presented below is my over-simplistic definition of e-
commerce.

According to Dictionary.COM, the term commerce is defined as follows: "The buying

and selling of goods, especially on a large scale, as between cities or nations". This
definition is straight forward and easy to understand. From here, we add the "e" for
"electronic", and we derive the definition: "buying and selling of goods electronically".
This typically means that orders and payments pass electronically. However, there is
more to this - much more, as follows:

B2B (Business-to-Business) E-Commerce really refers to supply chain technology,

which is by far the largest and most successful e-commerce technology employed
today. You can read my Insights about B2B E-commerce here.

B2C (Business to Consumer) E-Commerce refers to the selling and buying of goods
and services via the web from web retailers to web customers. This really is the same
thing as B2B E-Commerce with one key exception. With B2B implementations, the
parties are "Trusted Business Partners" who have an established working relationship.
With B2C E-Commerce, the retailers is often selling to unknown, un-trusted strangers.
Therefore extra effort must be made to capture customer and payment information.
Further, this data is typically verified before orders are fulfilled. In this respect, B2C is a
tougher solution to provide than B2B. However, B2C almost always involves a customer
typing information into an order screen, there is no need to link together two complex
accounting systems. In this respect, B2B is a much tougher solution to deliver.

B2E (Business to Employee) E-Commerce generally refers to the requisitioning of

supplies by employees for use in their jobs, but this really has grown to encompass
much more. For example, B2E makes it very easy for an employee to requisition a new
toner cartridge and printer paper - the order is entirely electronic, and supervisors are
asked to approved the requisition in the event that the total order exceeds preset limits
for that particular employee. However, B2E has grown into technologies that allow the
employee to access their employee records to update address information, shift
investments in the 401K plan, or maintain their internal resume. Many companies have
found that B2E technologies have dramatically reduced the administrative burdens with
the human resources department. Admittedly, maintaining employee information has
little to do with commerce, but this term has grown to encapsulate this activity into the
B2E definition.
C2C (Consumer to Consumer) E-Commerce has also emerged that allows unknown,
un-trusted parties to sell goods and services to one-another. An excellent example of
this is found at Ebay, where consumers sell their goods and services to other
consumers. To accommodate this activity, several technologies have emerged. Firstly,
Ebay allows all sellers and buyers to rate one another. In this manner, future
prospective purchasers may see that a particular seller has sold to more than 2,000
customers - all of whom rate the seller as excellent. In another example, a prospective
purchaser may see a seller who has previously sold only 4 times and all 4 rate the seller
poorly. This type of information is helpful. Another technology that has emerged to
support C2C activities is that of the payment intermediary. Pay Pal is a good example of
this. Instead of purchasing items directly from an unknown, un-trusted seller, the buyer
can instead send the money to Pay Pal. From there, Pay Pal notifies the seller that they
will hold the money for them until the goods have been shipped and accepted by the
buyer.

B2M (Business to Machines) E-Commerce is a fast emerging area within e-

commerce. The general idea is that companies can link to remote machines via the
internet. Here is an example. Assume that you drive a truck for Coca Cola and that it is
your job is to refill Coke machines throughout your community. You stop at a high rise
building that contains a Coke machine on every floor - now what? Do you leave the
drinks behind and visit every Coke machine first to determine how many of which
brands are needed? Do you carry cases of drinks with you as you go? With B2M
technology, the folks at Coke know exactly how many drinks are in each machine by
type of drink, and their accounting system produces a restocking report advising the
driver accordingly. In this manner, Coca Cola can monitor their machines from afar to
determine if they need repair or restocking. This information is then used to schedule
efficient delivery routes that allows you to restock the appropriate Coke machines just in
time before the inventory is depleted.

Peer to Peer (P2P) Though it is an e-commerce model but it is more than that. It is a
technology in itself which helps people to directly share computer files and computer
resources without having to go through a central web server. To use this, both sides
need to install the required software so that they can communicate on the common
platform. This type of e-commerce has quite low revenue generation as from the
beginning it has been inclined to the free usage due to which it sometimes got
entangled in cyber laws.

M-Commerce It refers to the use of mobile devices for conducting the transactions. The
mobile device holders can contact each other and can conduct the business. Even the
web design and development companies optimize the websites to be viewed correctly
on mobile devices.
Business-to-government (B2G) is a derivative of B2B marketing and often referred to
as a market definition of "public sector marketing" which encompasses marketing
products and services to various government levels - including federal, state and local -
through integrated marketing communications techniques such as strategic public
relations, branding, marcom, advertising, and web-based communications.

B2G networks provide a platform for businesses to bid on government opportunities

which are presented as solicitations in the form of RFPs in a reverse auction fashion.
Public sector organizations (PSO's) post tenders in the form of RFP's, RFI's, RFQ's,
Sources Sought, etc. and suppliers respond to them.

Government agencies typically have pre-negotiated standing contracts vetting the

vendors/suppliers and their products and services for set prices. These can be state,
local or federal contracts and some may be grandfathered in by other entities (ie.
California's MAS Multiple Award Schedule will recognize the federal government
contract holder's prices on a GSA General Services Administration Schedule).

There are multiple social platforms dedicated to this vertical market and they have risen
in popularity with the onset of the ARRA/Stimulus Program and increased government
funds available to commercial entities for both grants and contracts.

As another example, consider the $5 billion Ryder Truck Company - Ryder System Inc.
When a truck rolls into one of the company's maintenance bays, the attendant need
only push a button to instantly determine the status of that vehicle. Specifically, a
technician simply touches a probe on the end of a handheld computer to a coin-shaped
disk on the truck's cab that has been busy gathering information on engine performance
and fuel consumption from electronic sensors under the hood. All told, these sensors
track information related to 65 different aspects of the truck to oil life, tire wear, filter life,
gas mileage, and much more. Prior to the introduction of this B2M system in the early
nineties, the company's mechanics were wrong almost 50% of the time when it came to
identifying problems with the trucks. Now the sources of trouble are identified more
quickly and a truck's downtime is often cut in half. The company manages almost
10,000 technicians and 175,000 trucks, but with the B2M system, inventory tracking,