How E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees' empowerment and facilitate customer support

With the use of E-Commerce, cycle time, employees’ empowerment and customer support can be improved.

Cycle Time is part of the operational benefits of E-Commerce which is the total time from the beginning to the end of the process of a product which includes process time, during which a unit is acted upon to bring it closer to an output, and delay time, during which a unit of work is spent waiting to take the next action. E-Commerce reduces cycle time by streamlining the acquisition process (e.g. Online shopping), utilize online auctions to obtain real-time competitive bids for selected commodities or services; suppliers benefit by seeing where they stand with their bid. E-Marketplaces reduce cycle time by bringing new suppliers “on board”.

However, Employees’ empowerment and customer support is strategy benefits of E-Commerce in an organization. Employees’ empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behaves; take action, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. Through E-Commerce systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Resource Management System (HRMS) may provide the ability to help employees in their work. For example, using HRMS, an employer can configure payroll and benefits systems, create and manage training systems, and even track performance reviews and ERP which is a method designed to integrate several different data sources and/or processes into one single unified system which can provide better customer service and improved productivity of employees.

Customer support is a service that computer and software manufacturers, and third-party service companies that offer to customers who include mail-in service, carry-in service, on-site contract, hot lines and bulletin board system. With automated tools it is possible to interact with a customer in richer ways at virtually no cost. Some companies’ uses electronic bulletin board system which is like a forum within online services that staffed by services engineers that opens 24 hours a day to facilitate customer’s problems. Electronic bulletin boards enable you to download software to software upgrades that correct known bugs. Besides that, mail service is also part of the service that gives convenience to the customers to confirm the order or to solve a problem.

Related Links:

• http://www.purearticle.com/Article/What-is-ERP-/5711
• http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-hrms.htm
• http://www.isos.com.my/ecommerce/advantages.htm
• http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/C/customer_support.html
  

- Carmen Lee Jia Wen -

Identify and Compare the Revenue Model for Google, Amazon.com and eBay

Revenue model is a model to describe the various revenue streams your business will be putting in place and how each will generate the money. We will be discussing about the comparison of revenue model for few E-Commerce websites which are Google, Amazon.com and eBay.

Google is a public and profitable company focused on search services which named for the mathematical term “googol”. It operates web sites at many international domains, with the most trafficked that recognized as "world's best search engine" because it is fast, accurate and easy to use. Google generate most of the revenue from Google AdWords which is a pay per click advertising program that designed to allow the advertisers to present their advertisement to people at the instant that the people are looking for information related to what the advertiser offer.

Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce and it is the one of the first major companies to sell goods by internet. Amazon.com uses the Distributor Model as their revenue model which it takes ownership of the products where it sells products to those who directly entered the “store” to make purchase. As a result, it realizes the total revenue it gets off the product’s sale. For example, a supplier purchases a product from Amazon.com for $2.00 and resells it for $4.00. The $2.00 is the margin before costs. Once cost is factored in, however, the gross margin can be substantially less.

eBay.com is an online auction and shopping Web site in which people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. It has established localized web sites in thirty other countries and it also owns PayPal, StubHub, Skype and other business. EBay generate most of its revenue by Seller Fees. This fee system is quite complex where there are fees on listing a product on eBay and fees when product sells plus several optional fees which all based on various factors and scales. The latest financial results shows that Skype shows an increase of 61% over last year, PayPal increased up 32% from the same period last year.

Related Links :

1. www.organicspam.com/google_revenue_model.asp
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com
3. http://seekingalpha.com/article/72603-ebay-q1-2008-earnings-call-transcript?page=1.

- Carmen Lee Jia Wen -

Amazon.com - An example of e-commerce success and it's causes

Amazon.com is one of the world known e-commerce business and first major companies to sell goods by internet. It is launch online in year 1995, at first only online books can be found in Amazon.com which back then is called “Cadabra.com”, but soon it have diversified its business to include other products such as DVD, Music CDs, computer software, video games, furniture, toys and etc.

Amazon’s initial business plan was unusual. Amazon grew steadily in the late 90’s while other Internet companies grew blindingly fast. Due to that Amazon’s shareholders launch a lot of complains saying they aren’t earning profit fast enough. However, when the dot-com bubble (also known as I.T. bubble) burst, a lot of electronic companies went out of business but not Amazon, turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002, U.S. $5 million. Amazon was iconic "stock in which to invest" of the late 1990s dot-com bubble. Now, Amazon is the Internet's No. 1 music, No. 1 DVD and video, and No. 1 book retailer. (Amazon.com Investor Relations)

Amazon.com seeks to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online. Amazon.com's All Product Search scours the Web to help customers find merchandise that is not available at Amazon.com, Amazon.com Auctions, or Amazon.com zShops, making Amazon.com the shopping destination to find anything.

Amazon.com has also invested in leading Internet retailers that are improving the lives of customers by making shopping easier and more convenient. Such as:

1) Drugstore.com - An online retail and information source for health, beauty, wellness, personal care and pharmacy.

2) Pets.com - The online leader for pet products, expert information, and services.

3) HomeGrocer.com - The first fully integrated Internet grocery-shopping and home-delivery service with operations in Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and Southern California 4)

4) Gear.com - Which offers brand-name sporting goods at prices from 20 to 90 percent off retail

5) Ashford.com - The leading Internet retailer of luxury and premium products and the Web's No. 1 retailer of watches and jewelry.

According to Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com's V.P. of Site Development, stats that the key of success is to put a strong focus on customer experience, which is infused throughout all levels of the company and includes all aspects of the buying process. Therefore the engineers of Amazon.com really strong about thinking about customer experience where invest in leading Internet retailer that been mention above, whereby there’s a strong operations team who run the back-end operations. He also says that monitoring the customer experience is one of important factor to Amazon.com’s success. (The key of success)

- William Hong Weei Loon -

An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

The example of the E-commerce failure is boo.com. The boo.com website was widely criticized as poorly designed for its target online customer, going against many User-friendly conventions. The site relied heavily on javascript and Flash technology to display 3D views of wares as well as Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style avatar. The first publicly released version of the site was fairly hefty—the home page alone was several hundred kilobytes which meant that the vast majority of users had to wait minutes to load the web page because that that time the broadband technologies were still not widely available. The site's front page did contained the warning; "this site is designed for 56K modems and above" only can view it.

The complicated design required the site to be displayed in a fixed size window, which limited the space available to display product information to the customer. Navigation techniques changed as the customer moved around the site, which appealed to those who are visiting to view the website and causes customer frustration who simply wanted to do online shopping. The company also had decided to pay postage on returns, but even more importantly its interface was also very complex with a hierarchical system that requires the user to answer four or five different questions before revealing that the product is out of stocks in a particular sub-section. The same basic questions will have to be answered by the customer again and again until the results had been found.

-Alvin Poon Chee Hau- :P

The History and Evolution of E-Commerce

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) is the process of buying and selling of goods and services by transferring of funds over the networks through computers by digital and business communication. It also includes all inter-company and intra-company functions such as finance, marketing, manufacturing, and selling, that enable commerce by the use of electronic mail, electronic data interchange, fax, video conferencing, file transfer, or interaction with a computer.

The history and evolution of E-Commerce is basically to determine the different phases and process of transforming information technology into business process. It also provides details about how E-Commerce began to be used as a popular mean of economic exchange which refers to online transaction of goods.

It began with the introduction of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It is a set of standards developed in the 1960s to facilitate the interchange of vital business oriented information such as prices, inventory, and delivery with retailers making it possible to easily track trends and new products. Besides that, it enables the big business firms to indulge in a sort of beneficial electronic.

However, in the year of 1984, ASC X12 standards which also known as "ANSI X12" and "ASC X12”, is the official designation of the U.S. national standards body for the development and maintenance of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. During the 1990s, the internet was opened for commercial use; it was also the period that users started to participate in World Wide Web (WWW) which also refers to Mosaic web-browser, and the phenomenon of rapid personal computer (PC) usage growth. Due to the rapid expansion of the WWW network; e-commerce software; and the peer business competitions, large number of dot-com and Internet starts-ups appeared. Mosaic web-browser was the first point and click browser that could be downloaded and was name “Netscape” which allowed quicker access to E-Commerce. In the year of 1998, the development of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) expanded in California, USA. DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet. December 1998 was another major step in development of E-Commerce; “The Big Online Holiday Extravaganza” had generated over $1 billion for Amazon and AOL in within 10 weeks. Red Hat Linux is the next major step of E-Commerce history which occurred on August, 1999. Linux gave users another choice in a platform other then Windows that was reliable and open-source.

In August 1999, Napster had been an online application for music lovers to share music files for free. There was a major merger in early year 2000, between AOL and Time Warner which worth approximately of $350million that brought both together a major online company and a traditional company. In the same year on February, the hackers use Denial-of-Service Attack (DoS) to attack in some E-Commerce biggest giants including Yahoo, ebay and Amazon.com.

Well, the worldwide popularity of Internet has resulted in the stable development and overwhelming acceptance of E-Commerce and provides with a rich online transaction experience. It has revolutionized further and has been converted into E-Business with the optimum usage of resources such as the internet, credit card, E-Commerce software or shopping carts solutions. Loads of companies are shifting to E-Commerce and E-Business solutions because of easy availability of clients; provide better and faster approach towards the market. These modern techniques provide new and healthy business without much needed investment. E-Business has been termed to be the fastest growing industry in this modern era of computers and finance. E-Business has proved to be the most effective way for marketing products worldwide by just a click of a button with the help of several E-Commerce’s software.

Here are some websites that you can refer to that explains more detail on the history and evolution of E-Commerce :

1. http://www.netecommerce.net/history-of-ecommerce.html
2. http://www.jpservicez-searcharticles.com/article.detail.php/236839/13/Internet/116/Ecommerce/The_History_Of_E-commerce
3. http://www.flysyk02.netfirms.com/Ecommerce/History.htm
   

- Carmen Lee Jia Wen -