Business now in day have come a long way, there are many different types of business, for example we have companies that provide services, some of this services are staffing agencies, this companies provide temporary employment for companies that do not like have the hassle of having to deal with any type of problems for company requirements and still get the men power necessary to run a business. Other business have production of goods, this companies are dedicated to the production of goods to satisfy every day needs, they vary from creating food products to the creation of luxury items, some of this companies sell the products that they create to the end customers but most of them use retail companies to distribute their goods. Retail companies are dedicated to the promotion and sale of products.
When we see the world that we live on, we can see that technology runs more and more aspects of our life, regardless of what task we attempt to start or continue some way of technology is directly or indirectly involved, if we think of simple tasks like dressing up, we might not use machines to put on our clothes but the clothes that we are going to wear have been produce by a machine run by some form of technology, so even on simple tasks like putting a shirt on we have the use of technology, business now take advantage of all of this technology to run most of the everyday operations.
Our society more and more has turn into a cyber-society, in the past if you needed a pair of batteries, you would have to go to the town store and know that it would take you at least thirty minutes simply because you would take time to talk to the store owner and catch-up with what is happening in their lives, this was always part of an interaction between the customer and retailer, in this cyber-society if we need a set of batteries, we go to the computer and place an order, no person or interaction is involved, it becomes a one minute purchase and a couple of days later the mail man drops it on your door step. Although all these methods have made our life easier, we have lost the human interaction part of our lives. With the advances of these types of technologies, like mentioned before, business have implemented the use of all of these, business uses the internet to sell their goods, these process is called E-Commerce or in its long form Electronic Commerce.
Business have been conducting many types of electronic transactions since the nineteen sixties’ even with the few resources that were available at that time, business found the way to create different standards based on each individual company programmer and needs, at that time most companies used what it’s called EDI Electronic Data Interchange, at the time this was the best possible way to transmit any type of documents, and sales.
Since every company had its own standard there was no way to regulate that was legal and what wasn’t because at that time every company had a different system with no regard of any type of stands and the problem became when one company needed to make a transaction with another that had different standards, there was always a wall or obstacle that needed to be worked out, because of this reason in 1979 an agency had to get involved to regulate this standards.
In 1979 the ANSI American National Standards Institute, decided that it was necessary to regulate in some way what was going to be the standards for online transactions. The American National Standards Institute came up with the ASC X12, which was going to be the standard that business needed to follow in order to conduct any type of sharing of business document, this standards were created so that every business that needs to conduct any type of transaction would be same. Even with this standardization every transaction business was part of transfer protocol and was only available to big business, and was not user friendly at all.
In 1990 a little thing called the World Wide Web was created and this little hypertext-based web of information was the begging of the new era and paved the way for E-Commerce.
In 1995 a guy named Jeff Bezos did something that no one expected, he boxed up the first ever sold on Amazon.com, he did all of these from his garage, this simple process of selling a book over the internet within 30 days became as he proclaim himself the Earth’s Largest Bookstore and was selling books in all of 50 states and 45 countries.
By 1996 a guy got curios to see if people would use the internet for bidding on an item and after selling his first item, “A broken Laser” he continued doing it, his idea was so good and innovated that by the end on 1996 with only two full time employees EBay sold seven point two million dollars, leveling the field right along with Amazon.
Among many functions that E-Commerce has to offer some of them have to be mentioned and explained because they are the most common ones, the first one is the most logical one, which is the buying and selling of products and services, this simply means that you have the market in the palm of your hand, second is the union with other companies, every company can collaborate with each other in order to reach the customer in a more personal level, as well as work together to promote a product, another is to communicate with partners, also as part of the E-Commence shell is the fact for business intelligence on customers which means that companies are able to see trends in their sales to predict what customers are more skeptical to purchase and the latest trends to determine what’s next.
Just like any system E-Commerce has its advantages and disadvantages, one of the main disadvantages is the capacity of the signal that the internet is transmitted thru, for example in countries in which technology has not couth up, they could have very little bandwidth making the E part of commerce very slow and sometimes not possible, another possible disadvantage that come along with the type of technology that is the country, this problem is security, with minimum technology comes minimum training and maintenance, and with these aspects in mind security could become a big issue, last but not least there is the issue of acceptance, there is still a lot of people out there that does not believe in anything related to the internet in other words does not trust anything that starts with an E.
There are many advantages that involve the E-commerce shell, the main advantage is the speed in which the buying and selling process as well as easy to find products, another advantages is being able to have the ability to perform this process twenty four hours a day seven days a week, another is the ability to reach more customers References: * Roos, Dave. "The History of E-commerce" 15 April 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://money.howstuffworks.com/history-e-commerce.htm> 17 March 2013. * Maney, Kevin. "USATODAY.com - 10 Years Ago, EBay Changed the World."USATODAY.com - 10 Years Ago, EBay Changed the World. N.p., 22 Mar. 2005. Web. 17 Mar. 2013 * Webley, Kayla. “Time.com-Online Shopping.” “Time.com-Online Shopping.” July16,2010.