E commerce – in other words, business transactions on the Web where all it takes is a click of your mouse button and a flick of your fingers and you are on your way to being the proud owner of anything under the sun – is expected to boom beyond known limits in near future.
Why are we seeing such an interest in online business transactions?
The reason is……. the several e-commerce benefits which is enjoyed by both customers and merchants at the same time, a real win-win situation. Here’s a summary of e-commerce benefits for you to view and consider.
This is cheap to implement and maintain compared to traditional business model. Organizations doing e-commerce are getting orders through the web that they would have received anyway, so the revenue isn’t incremental.
This is accurate and everyone can rely on the data. However, these companies are realizing considerable cost savings because the orders are more accurate, and the handling cost per order is lower because fewer human hands touch each order.
Helps making manufacturing decisions easier. The web also allows customers to order specific items, and organizations can build to order, which reduces unwanted inventory. In this way, e-commerce makes just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing easier and reduces the parts needed in inventory over time. This setup reduces inventory carrying and warehousing costs. The cost per customer order drops because a human isn’t needed for each special order. Customer satisfaction foes up because customers are surer that they’ll get what they want, and they can order anytime.
Inventory and accounting can be managed. Putting up a website is easy, but it’s much more difficult to integrate that front end website into the back-end processes such as inventory, accounting, and so on. It is also hard to integrate customer data between the web interface and other customer contacts points such as telephone call or mail order.
New areas of business are developed and traditional middle man is eliminated. Informediaries, who provide information about products and who locate the best choice of price, replace intermediaries, the traditional middlemen. For example, Priceline.com helps customers set a price for an airline ticket or hotel reservation, and then airline or hotel responds. EBay allows customers to put their items up for auction and bid on items in real time. These new middlemen are allowing customers to do things they couldn’t do before, in a way that convenient for everyone.
E-commerce can improve the accuracy and speed for information exchange with internal and external business partners. Ecommerce provides organizations with the ability to quickly share information with business partners. Ecommerce also reduces the number of times humans touch information, which reduces errors.
E-commerce can lower the cost of customer service, purchasing, and other functions, but organizations shouldn’t just automate band business processes. Organizations must evaluate their current business processes and organizational practices in light of new technologies. Ecommerce is more than just technology-organizations must also change the way they think about information sharing and knowledge management.