What
is Ecommerce ?
The high rate of growth of business carried over Internet has made
it synonymous with the whole phenomenon of E-commerce. Electronic
commerce is the new term for existing activities being done in new
ways. As long as communication networks have been available,they
have been used to their fullest capability by entrepreneurs to create
business opportunities. Most prominently, the meteoric rise of the
Internet and the World Wide Web has accelerated the transformation
of global commerce, allowing for instantaneous, inexpensive contacts
among sellers, buyers, investors, advertisers, and financers throughout
the world. The rapid integration of the Internet and other telecommunications
based functions nearly into every sphere of business is what has
given rise to the recent international focus on the new world of
Electronic commerce.
Understanding
the concepts
Electronic
commerce is a much broader term encompassing not only EDI but also
other forms of communication,
such as E-mail and Electronic bulletin boards. EDI was primarily
developed for high volume exchange of commercial documents in standardized
electronic format over an electronic public network between the
automated business processes of trading partners. E-mail, on the
other hand, is the exchange of less structured correspondence
in electronic format.
History
of Internet
Internet
stands for Interconnected Networks. It is viewed as a prototype
of the I-way and,is the closest we have been
able to reach the standards of the ideal I-way proposed for e-commerce.
Presently a group of worldwide information highways, Internet was
started in 1965 as an experimental network with funding from the
Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of
Defense. Since then this network has grown from a handful of universities
and research institutes, to several thousand connections in over
hundred countries. With more and more organizations trying to get
access to Internet to see what was all about this 'information revolution',
the purpose of Internet evolved through different stages. Several
discipline specific networks were established during 1980-1985,
such as CSNET and MILNET. CSNET catered to the communication and
information requirements of computer science researchers all over
the world. MILNET took over the defense and military traffic from
ARPANET. The National Science Foundation (NSF) took over the academic
and research network from ARPANET and created NSFNET in 1987, which
was later christened as the Internet. The period 1985-1990 witnessed
major developments in the field of scientific research and Internet
connectivity became an essential tool for this progress. After the
success of Internet mail, IBM and MCI took over the management of
NSFNET. The US government prohibited commercial use of
NSFNET, so. a commercial backbone was also run parallel to the NSFNET.
This comprised of several private ISPs.
Types of Ecommerce
E-commerce
is not merely selling a T-shirt over the World Wide Web. It is much
more than that and includes
communioBtion activities among trading organisations and within
them. The prevailing E-commerce activities have
been divided into 3 major categories:
i)
Business to Consumer E-commerce
ii) Business to Business E-commerce
iii) Business to Employee E-commerce
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