Топик: What is E-Commerce

There are a lot of hard aspects about e-commerce as the recent failures in this branche show:

- making people to visit your site (getting traffic to come to your web site)

- how do you make yourself different from a (large) competition

- getting people to buy something at your site (people usually feel VERY uneasy about buying via Internet)

- you still need money (capital) to maintain your system and provide an effective customer support

So e-commerce does not mean that you can make profits easier than in a "normal" business. You have to manage all the activities concerned with marketing, finance, distribution, purchase and public relations.

These problems are the most relevat ones as competition grows all the time and people still try to avoid buying online. Stories about hackers using your credit card number or even large companies making losses in trying themselves in e-commerce – all this makes people even more sceptical about buying anything online.

However, this problems are also common in the old economy. So there are a few other hard aspects about e-commerce:

- legality (concerning international e-commerce companies; business contracts are defined differently by law in every country)

- ownership (the copyright problem is a very big one)

- privacy and security

What is Popular With E-Commerce?

Here you can see a list of products most popular with B2C e-commerce in Austria.

There were about 700.000 people who bought something via Internet in Austria in the year 2000.

Regardless of the rather bad development of the technology stock markets during the past few months, the number of people using internet to purchase products is likely to rise even more this year.

If we turn to the practical side of the whole thing, what are the most relevant details about

Building an E-Commerce Site

First of all, you need what your:

- suppliers (this is not different from a normal company – without good suppliers and efficient ways of purchasing goods you cannot offer products)

- prices (as price comparisons are very easy on the internet, you must have more competitive prices than the competition)

- customer relations (it means communicating with your (potential) customers efficiently – via e-mail, forums, chat-rooms, FAQ-pages, ... – try to provide as much information as possible)

- fulfillment and service (as for every other company in the "real" world you must provide quick and correct handling of the customers orders as well as an effective online-service)

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Implementing an E-Commerce Site

Now you can step on to creating your site.

Generally there are 3 possibilities how you can do this:

- enterprise computing (E C means that you have to purchase your own software and hardware and hire your own team of developers and supporters just to create and maintain your site – big firms which are very frequently visited by customers would usually do this).

- virtual hosting services (VHS means that all the facilieties required (such as the necessary hard- and software, security, ...) is provided and maintaned by another firm, for payment, of course. Usually it is a company specialised in providing VHS).

- simplified e-commerce (Here you just pay a company specialised in developing e-commerce systems to create a simple site for you. You must already have the necessary hard- and software. The basic functions of a simplified e-commerce system include displaying a product catalogue, allowing users to browse through it and allowing them to buy items from it).