PROSPECTS OF DEVELOPMENT AND FUTURE OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

Electronic Commerce is the name given to the business process of selling products, goods, and services over the Web. It is the application of various communications technologies to provide the automated exchange of business information with internal and external customers, suppliers and financial institutions. Electronic Commerce was born in a US research center in 1989. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began using the term „Electronic Commerce‟ while proceeding with one of the US government‟s military projects, and the term was used from the following year by the private sector. Examples of these technologies include Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), bar coding, scanning, E-mail, E-commerce and fax, to name a few. The bottom line is that Electronic Commerce requires a paradigm shift in the way corporations do business today. In the initial stage of e-commerce, studies concentrated on studying EDI, which is a device that enables electronic data exchange using a certain type of VAN (Value Added Network) among corporations (B2B: Business to Business) or between corporations and government (G2B: Government to Business). Such studies could be dispersed thanks to the growing commercialization of the Internet. Any size business can have an e-commerce strategy. Like most things where business and Information Technology (IT) intersect, the e-commerce strategy you are able implement is dependent on the money you have to invest. For example, a large e-commerce company can directly place orders into a supplier‟s order processing system, negating the need to have a telephone operator marshalling the sales requests from merchant to supplier and may be able to afford to buy space for prime time television commercials. A smaller e-commerce company may still have to phone in or fax their orders, but may only be able to buy adverts in the local paper or industry journals. Few would disagree that Amazon.com practices e-commerce. Airline on-line ticket reservations and purchasing are evidently candidates, as are eBay, Mbank and a host of others. But what of promotional web sites? What of ATMs? What about call centers that use telephony? And has all the Internet and Web hype really displaced the key functions of EDI? Telephones, FAX machines and dedicated data lines are very much a part of today‟s business delivery infrastructure, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Clearly “e-commerce” is a whole lot more than one technology and one user community. It is about the use of many technologies by many different individuals and organizations. The challenge is matching technology to need.