Tuesday, August 21, 2007

E-COMMERCE

Different communication networks were employed by companies to exchange their business data for several years. Now, as the internet is growing rapidly, e-commerce becomes the natural choice of big companies. Nowadays e-commerce is open to anybody who is interested. E-commerce is nothing but the business through electronic media or doing business through web.
The three basic components of e-commerce are e-information, e-relationships, and e-transaction. E-information is a multimedia data document in a web format. The e-relationship is about building a site that has the feeling of being a port of entry into a community. The e-transaction is the virtual distribution space.
E-commerce is not a dream or fiction but now a reality. Its graph points upward trend and now more and more business are getting web enabled. The major business companies who established e-commerce as their main business path are icici.com in financial sector, oracle.com in distribution sector, hp.com in post and pre sales support, the hindu.com in publishing and ebay.com in auctions etc.
E-commerce has effective and trusted mechanisms for privacy and security. Cryptography is a method of mathematical encoding used to transform messages into an unreadable format in an effort to maintain confidentiality of data.
In commerce, traditional payment mechanism employed is cash. In e-commerce, checks, credit cards, debit cards, and electronic fund transfer are employed. E-cash is a term used to refer a stored prepaid value that can be encashed for electronic purchases. The recent smart cards have many advantages over magnetic strip cards but are expensive. Another mechanism now common is electronic check, where the payer instructs his financial institution to pay a specific amount to another party, the payee.

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