E-COMMERCE WONDERLAND

In the 20th Century, most of the activities we are doing daily involved Information Technology, or so called ‘IT’. We always heard of the word “E- Commerce”. But, how well we all know about E-commerce?

According to Wikipedia, Commerce is a division of transaction which involves the activities of trade of goods and services between two parties, such as from producer to final consumer. It functions as the central mechanism which drives capitalism and certain other economic system but compare command economy, for example). Commercialization consists of the process of transforming something into a product, service or activity which one may then use in commerce.

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) is a technology used by some modern business through Internet or other computer networks to do business transaction between parties such as buying and selling of products, services or exchanging information. E-commerce can be classified into several categories. This includes:

Business-to-Business (B2B) as commerce transaction between businesses such as wholesaler and retailer or manufacturer and wholesaler.

Business-to-Customer (B2C) involved electronic transaction between a business and consumer with product, or services. Consumer can order the product they want through the company’s website, such as Dell, www.dell.com to order or customize the product they want.

Customer-to-Customer (C2C) where consumers sell to each other through auction sites, such as www.lelong.com , one of the auction sites in Malaysia.

Customer-to-Business (C2B) can be defined as consumers or individuals offer products and services to companies and the companies pay them. It is totally contrast to the traditional business model, B2C where companies offer products and services to customers.

E-commerce application was developed in the early 1970s, which was using the technology of Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to allow businesses in doing financial transaction from one party to another party such as sending electronic purchase orders or invoices. However, the use of these applications was limited to financial institutes, large corporations, and some daring businesses during that time.

The purpose of development of Electronic data interchange (EDI) is to improve the limitation of Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT). EFT expanded electronic transfers from financial transactions to other types of transaction processing. After the development, there is an increase in the number of company participated in this computer based application such as manufacturers, retailers and others. Such systems were called Interorganizational System (IOS). IOS allows the flow of information to be automated between organizations to reach a desired supply-chain management system, which enables the development of competitive organizations.

In 1980s, the growth and acceptance of credit cards, Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and telephone banking were also forms of electronic commerce. Electronic commerce would additionally include Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing in the 1990s. During 1994 e-commerce started to become popular. It tooks four years for it to develop the security protocols and DSL which allowed rapid access and connection to the internet. In the 2000s, e-commerce changed the process of purchasing of available goods and services over the internet using secure connections and electronic payment services. In year 2003, Amazon.com, www.amazon.com , the successful and famous E-commerce company had its first year with a full year of profit.

E-commerce business has become more and more popular nowadays. The success of Amazon.com has shown and makes people more confident to use this technology to expand their business. Since the technology is getting advance as time passed, I believes that someday in the future, every business will be using E-commerce to do their business.

By Sze Ying