Strategic Issues For A flourishing E-Commerce
1. Introduction
Strategic Issues For A flourishing E-Commerce
Electronic industry is for the age of information Technology what mercantilism, the quest for gold and the conquest of new lands were for the age of discovery. Like the prow of a large fishing boat, it draws towards itself all other interests and elements of society, and it will leave new discoveries and changes in its wake. The vast networking of world through optic fibers, satellites and wireless communication is creating a new global community and a new global market, in which most of the countries should participate. It is strengthening, roughly paradoxically, the identity of small groups, isolated communities and minority interests and driving them towards a less precious social and economic action and widening their opportunities. And most importantly, it is empowering small businesses to compete with multinational corporations and enabling consumers to quest the world for exactly what they needed.
E-Commerce basically means using networks (Internet) to carry out all the activities complex in company administration and operation: buying and selling of products and services, technology and partner search, dealing with counterparts, choosing the most suitable communication and insurances, performing bank transactions, paying and billing, communicating with company salesmen, picking up orders, and any other activities valuable for trading.
A company will be able to post a perfect catalog of it's products and services on the Internet, which can be continuously updated to present new or updated products, proving a large virtual showcase for inherent clients, a means to relate with clients and in that way, adjusts it's offer to their requirements; while at the same time it will get passage to virtual markets where it can buy what it needs.
Through integral systems already under development, one company will associate to other companies placed in any place in the world, to buy and sell, choosing the products and services which best meets its needs from a huge network. And it's true that this revolution involves us all.
2. Business-To-Business (B2B)
B2B e-commerce means companies buying from and selling to each other online. It automates and streamlines the process of buying and selling the intermediate products. It provides more dependable updating of company data. B2B makes product information ready globally and updates it in real time. Hence, procuring society can take benefit of vast amount of product information. [3]
Now, we must know what are the entities of B2B e-commerce & their concerns:
Selling company: with marketing administration perspective.Buying company: with procurement administration perspective.Electronic intermediary: A third party intermediating service supplier (the scope of service may be extended to comprise the order fulfillment ).Deliverer: who should fulfill the Jit (Just in Time Delivery)Network platform: such as the Internet, Intranet, and Extranet.Protocols and communication: such as Edi (Electronic Data Interchange) and comparison shopping, possibly using software agents.Back-end information system: possibly implemented using the intranet and company reserved supply Planning (Erp) systems.
B2B e-commerce implies that both the sellers and buyers are company corporations. It covers a broad spectrum of applications that enable an company or company to form electronic relationship with their distributors, re-sellers, suppliers, and other partners. B2B applications will offer enterprises passage to the following sorts of information:
Product: Specifications, prices, sales history.Customer: Sales history and forecasts.Supplier: product lines and lead times, sales terms and conditions.Product process: Capacities, commitments, product plans. Transportation: Carries, lead-times, costs.Inventory: inventory levels, carrying costs, locations.Supply chain alliance: Key contacts, partners roles and responsibilities, schedules.Competitor: Benchmarking, competing product offering, market share.Sales and marketing: Point of sales (Pos), promotions.Supply chain process and performance: Process descriptions, carrying out measures, quality, delivery time and customer satisfaction.
2.1 How to get the best
People all the time want to get the best shot in life. To deliver a sound return on your venture you must add on time delivery and flavor of some strategies. This strategy should comprise permissible marketing, channel management, solid technology, strategic partners and great products. Let us have a look on each of them.
2.1.1 Just in Time delivery (Jit)
In such a case (Jit), delivery materials and parts on time is a must. Using E-Commerce, it is highly inherent to assure Jit deliveries. Just in time delivery can be realized by the co-coordinated endeavor of delivery- service company and suppliers inventory policy.
Quick delivery does not necessarily mean Jit delivery, but the system for quick delivery is the backbone of Jit delivery. For the B2B E-Commerce environment the advance confirmation of the delivery date at the contract stage is very important. [5][15]
2.1.2 Add strategies to your business
2.1.2.1 Direct Marketing
In a typical company organization, buying decisions, especially for products over a few thousand dollars, are made by group of individuals. As a result, direct marketers need to extent the reach of their programs to dissimilar functional areas and possibly even dissimilar levels within a functional area.
There are multiple buyers and influences in any society who play a role in the buying decision. You may know with inexpensive certainty who your former target is, but secondary target can be just as foremost to reach. You may have to reach company buyers and influencers in three basic administration areas (functional management, financial administration and general management) and do it at middle to upper managerial, as well as technical levels. To do it companies need correct E-mail list, which they can form by viewing companies Websites and reviewing yearly reports and other social documents.
2.1.2.2 relationship Marketing
Business buyers are not all the time ready to buy products or services when you are ready to sell them. Factors you cannot control, such as the companies' budgeting process, the need for further approvals, or purchasing procedures, may have a direct impact on plans to purchase. There may be a casual interest in the product but not an immediate need.
The smart B2B direct marketer compensates for this uncertainty by production sure a agenda of regular, ongoing communications (often called a continuity program) is in front of prospects periodically. This can be done by direct E-mail and by placing the information on the website.
2.1.2.3 Internet Marketing
Several inherent marketing strategies can be used in B2B E-Commerce marketing. These strategies can be classified into the following five categories:
Generating and qualifying leads with the Internet.Using Internet events to promote products and services.Executing instant fulfillment on the Internet.Generating orders through the Internet.Enhancing customer relationship with the Internet.
2.1.2.4 Channel Management
The first element is coherent marketing or channel management. The true test of a thriving E-Commerce implementation is how well it exploits the Internet to reach, capture and maintain the right customers. choosing which products and services will be offered through which channel is also a crucial decision.
E-commerce runs across multiple sales channels, including direct, indirect and E-marketplaces. The choice of which marketplaces to use as sales channels is a crucial decision.
In increasing to marketplaces, using indirect sales channels is also an area for explosive sales opportunities. Enabling your selling partners to host your catalog, inventory and fulfillment databases on their systems can generate efficiency that grows their company and yours. You also can continue your direct one-to-one trading relationship with long time strategic vendors by "E-enabling" the entire company process from the first request for quote through order fulfillment to automated billing and payment.
These channels generate a situation where the E-Commerce sell side platform must transact across multi-channel selling strategies --which brings us to the next element of your strategy: technology.
2.1.2.5 Technology
Industry accepted tools often allow a distributor to build and carry on product catalogs and article once and use them throughout the entire multi-channel selling conduits. Evolving tools and capabilities allow you to form customer kindly web sites and win repeat customers by building customer loyalty. The front end for e-commerce selling is an foremost piece of B2B success, connecting your new web systems with your existing systems. The 24*7 online marketplace means your E-business has to be continually available. It infrastructure must provide more performance, reliability, protection and process integration than a bricks-and-mortar environment. In addition, mainframes hosting the databases and Erp (Enterprise reserved supply Planning) systems operating the administration systems must be seamlessly integrated with the e-commerce engine to provide the caliber of service customers expects and to perceive the cost efficiencies B2B E-Commerce can provide. choosing a flexible E-Commerce platforms and a system integrator experienced with the entire company process is a must for success.
2.1.2.6 Partners
Like choosing the Internet as a sales channel, it's also foremost to opt the right partners, including an integration partner who is experienced in helping to move ahead rapidly across the entire E-business process. We have to accept that any move to E-Commerce is not about incremental improvement, rather basal redesign of the key company processes.
2.1.2.7 Products
With the presence on the web, we can effectively and efficiently transact company with our clients 24*7. But so can our competitors. Survivals and success in E-Commerce entails more than naturally building a storefront to sell online. [5]
3. Business-To-Consumer (B2C)
While the term E-Commerce refers to all online transactions, B2C stands for "Business-to-Consumer" and applies to any company or society that sells its products or services to consumers over the Internet for their own use.
In the late 90s, dotcoms-- which were swiftly gaining in size and market capitalization -- posed a threat to former brick and mortar businesses. In many ways, these dotcoms seemed to be rewriting the rules of company -- they had the customers without the expenses of maintaining corporeal stores, tiny inventory, unlimited passage to capital and tiny concern about actual earnings. The idea was to get big fast and worry about profits later. And a popular view automatically comes into our mind: " Learn to swim while the tide is out. Learn from the kinds of customers that are out there now. It is a small market- play with it; learn to price company in this market, learn how to assess risk. If you can do it well, the stakes will get higher and you will corollary where others may not."
3.1 What are the major challenges of B2C e-commerce
3.2 Six Keys to B2C E-Commerce success
So, what does it no ifs ands or buts take to capture the E-consumer and generate online assurance sales? Based on assurance & Technology's interviews with both early adopters and industry analysts, there appear to be six key success factors:
Strategic Goals Assessment/Customer Needs estimation What are your goals as a company? Who are your customers? What are their needs? These may sound like basic questions, but both insurers and analysts emphasize that a company's Web presence must reflect this information. Create a Usable, Targeted and Sticky Web Site Usability and site carrying out are some of the key factors insurers need to keep in mind when developing their B2C E-Commerce strategies. Insurers also need to be aware of all of their assorted constituencies when developing B2C initiatives. The Web can reach multiple audiences and none should be overlooked. A good Web site will relate with consumers as well as company partners, agents, suppliers and vendors. Stickiness, or the success of a Web site in attracting and keeping new and returning visitors, is an additional one success factor. Turning the site into more of an information portal with real-time news feeds with keeping article updated and synchronized will help keep customers arrival back. Integration The Internet is not a stand-alone platform or medium. To be an productive service and distribution channel, it must be integrated with back-end legacy systems, agent systems, call centers, marketing initiatives and pricing and underwriting systems. The Internet is naturally an additional one customer relationship channel and integration with other customer service functions is surely a number-one priority.Innovate with Web Applications and Real-Time Transactions B2C online applications range from the relatively basic, such as updating policy information, to the complex, such as comparative rate quoting and electronic claims submission. Regardless of the exact functions a company plans to add to its Web site, they must serve the needs of the E-consumer. This means that web sites should have interactivity and immediate gratification.Partnerships Although insurers need to be selective in initiating online partnerships, such agreements have the inherent to expand market reach and add features in a relatively low-cost manner. Agreeing to a new Gartner Group study, 46 percent of assurance firms active on the Web have partnerships with banks, 30 percent have partnerships with other assurance companies and 22 percent have partnerships with venture firms. Partnerships with assurance portals provide comparative quoting capabilities and may generate business. Put Tools in Place To Keep Learning E-consumer is a attractive target. Investor should all the time say that they are still playing and all the time capturing information from all of their channels. They must focus on groups, used third-party assessments and have hired user interface specialists. "The process is iterative: You just keep learning." [5]
4. Infrastructure Integration
In this web enabled world, customers rule. The ability to offer mass customization has come to be a practical reality. To rapidly meet these requirements, time to deployment of new or enhanced application is shrinking dramatically. These applications must be built to be easy to use, nimble, open, extensible, and ready across all platforms and all these demanding characteristics must be achieved at minimal cost.
Replacement of legacy system application is precious so it is seen that population started to compound information from disparate sources and incorporate them for seamless information flow, the query to relate with a wide range of mobile devices, and the shortage of skills and knowledge that are further compounded by shrinking time-to-deployment requirements.
These software integration technologies lower development and deployment costs by doing the following:
Supplying the communication and integration code so application developers can incorporate on the value-added company logic;Providing a accepted platform on which to build, deploy, and carry on distributed applications;Reducing the It skills required to deliver difficult company requirements; Providing rapid application development tools to eliminate convention coding and simplify integration; andEnabling the reuse of integration components over many projects.
4.1 What is needed for Integration
RequirementsTraditional requirements definition based on the functionality desired is yielding to a definition Based on time-to-deployment and the ability to incorporate hereafter technologies. New infrastructure requirements are emerging which places more point on the task of planning the migration path to newer technologies. Technology selectionFor the best corollary the right technology should all the time be picked up. Technology should be such that the integrated solution fulfill the following criteria's: Extensibility and reusability, Flexibility, Efficiency, Interoperability and breadth, Cost effectiveness, Ease of maintenance, Deployment ease and efficiency, Ease of administration, industry acceptability, company integration, Technological innovation. [1]
4.2 Benefits of Integration
It has been surveyed that the end users are benefited in assorted ways after the completion of
Integration project. Benefits thus obtained are:
Simple and perfect development platform,Platform independence,Network-aware development and run-time platform,Technologically unified intranet, extranet and Internet,Central administration of new software versions,Easy passage to company It resources,Rich and highly functional user interface component,Simple and robust protection model. [1]
5. protection Issues
Security is a major issue in developing E-Commerce because this is probably the most foremost theorize population hesitates to buy things on the Net. Buying on the Net requires your reputation card amount and other personal information. But broadcasting your reputation card amount through the ether? It sounds pretty dicey. So, it's a challenge for companies to make their site gain and safe so that population can fully rely on them.
5.1 What does protection imply
Whatever the environment, paper or electronic, securing it necessarily implies the arresting of
Destruction of information andUnauthorized availability of information.
5.2 protection issues
The issues that confront us in relation to securing electronic transaction are therefore:
ConfidentialityIntegrityAvailabilityAuthenticity/Non-reputabilityAuditability
Confidentiality:
Information should be protected from prying eyes of unauthorized internal users, external hackers and from being intercepted during transmission on communication networks by production it unintelligible to the attacker. The article should be transformed in such a way that it is not decipherable by anything who does not know the transformation information.
Integrity:
On retrieval or receipt at the other end of a communication network the information should appear exactly as was stored are sent. It should be inherent to generate an alert on any modification, increasing or deletion to the former content. Integrity also precludes information "replay" i.e., a fresh copy of the data is generated or resent using the authorization features of the earlier authentic message. suitable mechanisms are required to ensure end-to end message article and copy authentication.
Availability:
The information that is being stored or transmitted across communication networks should be ready whenever required and to anything extent as desired within pre-established time constraints. Network errors, power outages, operational errors, application software errors, hardware problems and viruses are some of the causes of unavailability of information. The mechanisms for implementation of counter measures to these threats are ready but are beyond the scope of end-to-end message protection for implementing Electronic Commerce.
Authenticity:
It should be inherent any someone or object from masquerading as some other someone or object. When a message is received it should therefore be inherent to verify it has no ifs ands or buts been sent by the someone or object claiming to be the originator. Similarly, it should also be inherent to ensure that the message is sent to the someone or object for whom it is meant. This implies the need for dependable identification of the originator and recipient of data.
Non-reputability:
After sending / authorizing a message, the sender should not be able to, at a later date, deny having done so. Similarly the recipient of a message should not be able to deny receipt at a later date. It should, therefore be inherent to bind message acknowledgements with their originations.
Auditability;
Audit data must be recorded in such a way that all specified confidentiality and integrity requirements are met.[2]
5.3 protection solutions
Cryptography is the most widely used technique for implementing technology solution for the above mentioned protection problems. It comprises encryption -- the process of production information unintelligible to the unauthorized reader and decryption - reserving encryption to make the information readable once again. Accepted cryptography uses a incommunicable code or key to encrypt information. The same incommunicable key is used by the receiver to decrypt the information.[14]Password is the most tasteless mechanism used for authenticate people. Passwords are improbable to be known only by the owner. The onus is on the owner to keep the password secret.Digital signature can be used not only to verify the authenticity of the message and the claimed identity of the sender, but also to verify the message integrity. The recipient, however, should not be able to use the received digital signature to falsely "sign" messages on profit of the former sender. Here a message is encrypted with the sender's incommunicable key to generate the 'signature'. The message is then sent to the destination along with this signature. The recipient decrypts the signature using the sender's social key, and if the corollary matches with the copy of the message received, the recipient can be sure that the message was sent by the claimed originator and that the message has not been modified during transmission, since only the originator is in rights of the corresponding encryption key. It is a two key cryptosystems.A more productive solution can be obtained by using a biometric authentication device, such as a fingerprint scanner, in the e-wallet. Smart card are similar to reputation cards except that they have chips embedded in them. These cards can be used to store value and carry authentication information.
6. Conclusion
Changing market scenario puts pressure on company persons to adapt new and smart strategies to reach the pinnacle of success. New inventions are rapidly becoming part of It infrastructure. But to get productive feedback we need a multi functional team advent consisting of company population who can correctly identify company requirements, technology requirements and success criteria. population can sell out the risk and time-to-deployment by inspecting the factors described above.
7. References
Aberdeen Group, Inc. "e-Business Infrastructure Integration: Practical Approaches," An menagerial White Paper, Boston, Massachusetts 02108, Usa, November 2001Kamlesh K. Bajaj and Debjani Nag, "E-Commerce: The Cutting Edge of Business," Tata-McGrawHill, 1999Efraim Turban, Jae Lee, David King, H. Michael Chung, "Electronic Commerce-A Managerial Perspective," Pearson instruction Asia, 2001Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston, "Frontiers of Electronic Commerce," Addison Wesley, 2001Susmita Das, Malabika Dinda, Sudipa Batabyal, Sangeeta Mishra, "A Study on assorted Aspects of E-Commerce Paradigms with One form Implementation," B.Tech.(Honours) Thesis, Haldia form of Technology (Vidyasagar University), 2002Simon S. Y. Shim, Vishnu S. Pendyala, Meera Sundaram, and Jerry Z. Gao, "Business to company E-Commerce Frameworks," Computer, Ieee Computer Society, Volume 33, amount 10, October 2000.Wenli Wang, Zoltan Hidvegi, Andrew D. Bailey Jr., and Andrew B. Whinston, "E-Process form and assurance Using Model Checking," Computer, Ieee Computer Society, Volume 33, amount 10, October 2000Tim Ebringer, Peter Thorne, and Yuliang Zheng, "Parasitic Authentication To safe Your E-Wallet," Computer, Ieee Computer Scciety, Volume 33, amount 10, October 2000Abhijit Chaudhury, Debasish Mallick, and H. Raghav Rao, "Web Channels in E-Commerce," Communications of the Acm, Volume 44, amount 1, January 2001Ted Becker, "Rating the Impact of New Technologies on Democracy," Communications of the Acm, Volume 44, amount 1, January 2001Joe Mohen and Julia Glidden, "The Case for Internet Voting," Communications of the Acm, Volume 44, amount 1, January 2001Deborah M. Philips and hans A. Von Spakovsky, "Gauging the Risks of Internet Elections," Communications of the Acm, Volume 44, amount 1, January 2001Lance J. Hoffman and Lorrie Cranor, Guest Editors, " Internet Voting for social Officials," Communications of the Acm, Volume 44, amount 1, January 2001Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks," Third Edition, Prentice-HallDebajyoti Mukhopadhyay and Sangeeta Mishra, "How to Meet The Challenges Of Managing E-Commerce Successfully," Journal of the Calcutta administration Association, Volume Vii, amount 2: August 2002
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