Presented By : Siddhartha Monga
Reg. No. : 9213-00-082
Batch Code : SME-017
Back to ISAS Heaven Main Page Home | ISAS Heaven | What's New | Students | Cool Links | Articles | Source Code | Tips & Tricks | MCSD | MCSE | Jokes | About Us | About Rinoo | Contact UsIntroduction to Internet Based Business
Your exams are finally over and you are enjoying a vacation in your aunt's place in the US that is until that pesky sister of yours reminds you of just whose birthday is just three days away. Horrors! Here you are in New York and Your Girlfriend is half a world away. What do you do? You switch on your cousin's computer, connect to the Internet and browse through to a Web site selling books. There, you select her favourite author's latest book, give in her name and address. Finally, you pay it by using your aunt's credit card. Phew! Rescued by the net from horrors worse than death itself.
As you can see the Net is emerging as the near perfect medium for doing business. It reaches a global audience at a reasonable cost, easy to set up and it is growing like crazy. On the flip side, these very same features of the net are plagued with issues like secure transfer of funds, privacy, trade laws and in the case of India, high cost of dedicated internet connection.
The Internet will open up unsuspected business opportunities. The possibilities are staggering. Currently, over 80 million people are surfing the net, a new home page is posted every 5 seconds and 2.5 million people have already traded products and services over the net. According to a study by Forester Research, electronic transaction sales standing at about $520 million in 1996, are set to rise to a turnover of over $6.6 billion by the millenium.
The market for online business is also enormous. IBM estimates by the year 2004 AD, 600 to 800 million people will have access to Internet. In a survey of commercial WebSite operators, 31% claim to be operating at a profit and 28% expect to enter the black in the next few months.
What is E-Commerce?
Broadly speaking, there are two types of internet-based commerce: business-to-business and retail-oriented. As the name suggests, the business-to-business type of Internet commerce involves transactions such as purchase or tender for sale between companies. Most business-to-business transactions are typically of high value, often running into millions of dollars. An example could be the global aircraft manufacturer Boeing inviting suppliers of parts.
In the case of retail-oriented commerce, business is oriented towards individuals like you. Products here could be anything ranging from books all the way up to shares in the stock market. An internet based retail business is similar to the mail-order business, where you are required to select the product(s) you are interested in buying and how many of them you will need. The difference is that instead of mailing the selected product list along with your cheque or credit card number, you type in your credit card number and click. Buy with your mouse.
Applications of E-Commerce
Applications Types of companies
Standardising E-Commerce Standards
To promote the adoption of e-commerce standards, 28 companies came together early this year to form a non-profit company, RosettaNet.
The objective of the company is to facilitate the worldwide deployment of e-commerce standards so that companies can seamlessly exchange information and transaction with each other.
RosettaNet plans to address this by establishing a base dictionary and a set of rules from existing standards on how to do business on the Internet. The common base includes extensible markup language or XML, which will be the key element of the common language and rules for communications.
The 28 founding companies include global hardware and software players like IBM CISCO, MICROSOFT and SAP, shippers such as Federal Express as well as end users like ABB and AMERICAN EXPRESS.
E-commerce In India
During the last three years of Internet usage in the country, a number of internet-based applications have become a part of our lives. E-mail is one such example. And the next in the series is Electronic Commerce or E-Commerce. Talk of e-Commerce and thinks of transactions on the net, online shopping etc. That's exactly what it means. E-Commerce is soon going to transform the way business is conducted in India. Organizations like Citibank, ICICI Bank, Rediff on the Net, and others have already paved the way for acceptance of this new concept.
Rediff on the Net(www.rediff.com) has set up India's first e-commerce service.this will give Indian consumers the oppurtunity to shop from their desktops and pay online using credit cards.
Delhi's own bababazaar.com which started in december '98, supplies to residents in Delhi, Noida and DLF.
Trisoft Design, in a bid to bring connaught Place into your homes at a click, has built a site called cpmall.com, a guide to the shops and products available in this premier market in the capital.
Internet-Based Shopping
Consider the online bookstore Amazon.com. If you want to buy a book online, all you have to do is surf to the Web site www.amazon.com. Search the bookstore for your book by authors' name, title or both.
Once your find the books you are looking for, all you have to do is click the 'add it' to your shopping cart button. Like a real shopping cart, the 'shopping cart' at Amazon.com holds together all you want to buy. You can then either search for more books or buy the book you selected by clicking on the 'done' button.
To purchase the book, enter your name, address, and credit card number in the form provided online and submit it. Once this is done, the computer running the WebSite verifies your credit card by forwarding your credit card number onto a credit card verification service, following which, your order is processed. The credit card verification service is now responsible for the transfer of money from your bank account to Amazon's for your purchases. Of course, all this data transfer between your web browser, the amazon web server and credit card verification service is scrambled (encrypted) to protect all parties against credit card fraud.
On the acceptance of your order, the warehouse where amazon.com stocks its book is notified of your purchase. The books your ordered are then packed and delivered to you through courier services.
What is E-Business?
It is about the way companies deal with their suppliers and distributors on extranets. It is about how companies deal with their various divisions with Internet. It is about business processes and distributing through channels. And e-commerce is just a subset of e-business, which is very, very big. It is all about how business behaves and how your business runs on the Internet.
E-business does not mean having your own home page on the Internet. Such an approach is more likely to damage the business than to promote it. E-business is also significantly more than ordering a book or booking an air-ticket online.
E-business is re-writing relationships between colleagues, suppliers, business partners and customers. It will never replace the traditional business, but should be seen as an additional channel through which to reach the customer.
Key Benefits of E-Business
'E' - is for everything (Summary)
To conclude, we've come a long way from there, taking one step in the alphabet soup. If you aren't already swamped under the e-word, get ready to be. And this time, there's no offence to anybody. Except perhaps the Ludites. And they don't really count in the digit age. E-mail to E-commerce and E-cash to E-card -- the electrons are taking over life, as we know it. There's a whole new grammar evolving; get set for e-language with its emoticons J
E-commerce is the new warrior of this transformation. Ever since the concept of trade and selling and buying took root in human consciousness, never has one idea threatened to change the way of all business. If I can exchange ideas with someone else, why can't I use the same medium to exchange goods? The beauty of this logic is breathtakingly simple. From the faltering steps of a few years ago, e-commerce expected to grow to about 400 billion dolars the turn of this millenium. Many enabling factors have contributed -- faster networks, better encryption systems, streamlined transfer of money.
The quality of these factors is getting better. More buyers now believe the web is a good shopping mart; most sellers realize the web is worth investing into sell-stuff. Ergo, the boom in e-commerce.
E-commerce does not have to look very far for a standard bearer. And in a delicious twist of irony, amazon.com pioneered the way. For this venture of Jeff Bezos, deals in book, creations whose death knell has sounded at regular intervals. Three years down the line after making its debut on the web, amazon.com has sold its wares to 4.5 million customers in 160 countries. Its also forced traditional bookstores to open their online editions -- browse through the selection at Barnesandnoble.com among others.
The fifth letter of the English language, then, is bulldozing its way into our ethos. We've been forewarned; its upto us to be forearmed. Either we exploit the power of the 'e' word or we get extinguished in 'e' life.
'E' - is for everything
To conclude, we've come a long way from there, taking one step in the alphabet soup. If you aren't already swamped under the e-word, get ready to be. And this time, there's no offence to anybody. Except perhaps the Ludites. And they don't really count in the digit age. E-mail to E-commerce and E-cash to E-card -- the electrons are taking over life, as we know it. There's a whole new grammar evolving; get set for e-language with its emoticons J
E-commerce is the new warrior of this transformation. Ever since the concept of trade and selling and buying took root in human consciousness, never has one idea threatened to change the way of all business. If I can exchange ideas with someone else, why can't I use the same medium to exchange goods? The beauty of this logic is breathtakingly simple. From the faltering steps of a few years ago, e-commerce expected to grow to about 400 billion dolars the turn of this millenium. Many enabling factors have contributed -- faster networks, better encryption systems, streamlined transfer of money.
The quality of these factors is getting better. More buyers now believe the web is a good shopping mart; most sellers realize the web is worth investing into sell-stuff. Ergo, the boom in e-commerce.
E-commerce does not have to look very far for a standard bearer. And in a delicious twist of irony, amazon.com pioneered the way. For this venture of Jeff Bezos, deals in book, creations whose death knell has sounded at regular intervals. Three years down the line after making its debut on the web, amazon.com has sold its wares to 4.5 million customers in 160 countries. Its also forced traditional bookstores to open their online editions -- browse through the selection at Barnesandnoble.com among others.
The fifth letter of the English language, then, is bulldozing its way into our ethos. We've been forewarned; its upto us to be forearmed. Either we exploit the power of the 'e' word or we get extinguished in 'e' life.
Bibliography
The following sites and sources were tapped to cull out the information contained in this presentation and documentation.
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