MEANING OF ECOMMERCE

E-Commerce or Electronic Commerce means buying and selling of goods, products, or services over the internet. E-commerce is also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce. These services provided online over the internet network. Transaction of money, funds, and data are also considered as E-commerce. These business transactions can be done in four ways: Business to Business (B2B), Business to Customer (B2C), Customer to Customer (C2C), Customer to Business (C2B). The standard definition of E-commerce is a commercial transaction which is happened over the internet. Online stores like Amazon, Flipkart, Shopify, Myntra, Ebay, Quikr, Olx are examples of E-commerce websites. By 2020, global retail e-commerce can reach up to $27 Trillion. Let us learn in detail about what is the advantages and disadvantages of E-commerce and its types.

E-commerce is a popular term for electronic commerce or even internet commerce. The name is self-explanatory, it is the meeting of buyers and sellers on the internet. This involves the transaction of goods and services, the transfer of funds and the exchange of data.

So when you log into your Amazon and purchase a book, this is a classic example of an e-commerce transaction. Here you interact with the seller (Amazon), exchange data in form of pictures, text, address for delivery etc. and then you make the payment.

Brief History Of E-Commerce

The history of E-commerce is a history of how Information Technology has transformed business processes. Some authors will track back the history of E-commerce to the invention of the telephone at the end of last century. The Internet was conceived in 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (a Department of Defence organization) funded research of computer networking. The Internet could end up like EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) without the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1990s. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is widely viewed as the beginning of E-commerce if we consider E-Commerce as the networking of business communities and digitalization of business information.

EDI, which expanded from financial transactions to other transaction processing and enlarged the participating companies from financial institutions to manufacturers, retailers, services, and so on. Many other applications followed, ranging from stock trading to travel reservation systems .Such systems were described as telecommunication applications and their strategic value was widely recognized. With the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s and its rapid growth to millions of potential customers, the term electronic commerce was coined, and EC applications expanded rapidly. One reason for the rapid expansion of the technology was the development of networks, protocols, software, and specifications. The other reason was the increase in competition and other business pressures. From 1995 to 1999 we have witnessed many innovative applications ranging from advertisement to auctions and virtual reality experiences. Almost every medium- and large-sized organization in the United States already has a Web site many are very extensive; for example, in 1999 General Motors Corporation offered 18,000 pages of information that included 98,000 links to its products, services, and dealers.

Definition Of E-Commerce:

Concepts of E commerce

Electronic commerce is an emerging model of new selling and merchandising tools in which buyers are able to participate in all phases of a purchase decision, while stepping through those processes electronically rather than in a physical store or by phone (with a physical catalogue). The processes in electronic commerce include enabling a customer to access product information, select items to purchase, purchase items securely, and have the purchase settled financially. It is an emerging concept that describes the process of buying and selling or exchanging of products, services; and information via computer networks including the Internet.

E-commerce is basically, doing business-as-usual, but across the Internet. You advertise your products or services on your Web site, as you would in any other media like newspapers, TV or brochures. Advertising on your Web site can be done in two ways.

The first is by use of a relatively simple Web site consisting of a few pages whereby you tell potential customers who you are, what you do, where you are and how they can contact you ( easiest done by giving them your email address).

The second way of enabling world-wide customers to buy from you is to provide them with an On-Line Catalogue of your products which they can browse at their leisure without having to go to your place of business.

On-Line Catalogue:

On-Line Catalogue is that catalogue where people access via the Internet. On-Line Catalogue is an integral part of website, enabling customers to...

Browse through stock list, read about an item or service;

Look at photographs of the products.

Select which items they want to purchase

And drop them into a shopping cart as they go along.

When they have completed their shopping, they go to the

Check-Out.

The next step is to request the order by filling in their details and method of payment on a form which is waiting for them at the Check-Out. The form is already partially completed with a breakdown of the items in their shopping cart, prices inclusive of tax, and shipping & handling charges, if any. If they choose to pay by credit card, the form includes a place for them to fill in their credit card number. And then, with one press of a button, they send the order to you.

Electronic Commerce under different perspectives:

Let’s see how Electronic Commerce (EC) is defined under each perspective.

1. Communications Perspective

EC is the delivery of information, products /services, or payments over the telephone lines, computer networks or any other electronic means.

2. Business Process Perspective

EC is the application of technology toward the automation of business transactions and work flow.

3. Service Perspective

EC is a tool that addresses the desire of firms, consumers, and management to cut service costs while improving the quality of goods and increasing the speed of service delivery.

4. Online Perspective

EC provides the capability of buying and selling products and information on the internet and other online services.

Advantages of E-Commerce

Some advantages that can be achieved from e-commerce include:

• Being able to conduct business 24 x 7 x 365.: E-commerce systems can operate all day every day. Your physical storefront does not need to be open in order for customers and suppliers to be doing business with you electronically.

• Access the global marketplace: The Internet spans the world, and it is possible to do business with any business or person who is connected to the Internet. Simple local businesses such as specialist record stores are able to market and sell their offerings internationally using e-commerce. This global opportunity is assisted by the fact that, unlike traditional communications methods, users are not charged according to the distance over which they are communicating.

• Speed: Electronic communications allow messages to traverse the world almost instantaneously. There is no need to wait weeks for a catalogue to arrive by post: that communications delay is not a part of the Internet / ecommerce world.

• Marketspace: The market in which web-based businesses operate is the global market. It may not be evident to them, but many businesses are already facing international competition from web-enabled businesses.

• Opportunity to reduce costs: The Internet makes it very easy to 'shop around' for products and services that may be cheaper or more effective than we might otherwise settle for. It is sometimes possible to, through some online research, identify original manufacturers for some goods - thereby bypassing wholesalers and achieving a cheaper price.

• Computer platform-independent: Many, if not most, computers have the ability to communicate via the Internet independent of operating systems and hardware. Customers are not limited by existing hardware systems.

• Efficient applications development environment: In many respects, applications can be more efficiently developed and distributed because the can be built without regard to the customer's or the business partner's technology platform. Application updates do not have to be manually installed on computers. Rather, Internet-related technologies provide this capability inherently through automatic deployment of software updates.

• Allowing customer self service and 'customer outsourcing': People can interact with businesses at any hour of the day that it is convenient to them, and because these interactions are initiated by customers, the customers also provide a lot of the data for the transaction that may otherwise need to be entered by business staff. This means that some of the work and costs are effectively shifted to customers; this is referred to as 'customer outsourcing'.

• Stepping beyond borders to a global view. Using aspects of e-commerce technology can mean your business can source and use products and services provided by other businesses in other countries..

• A new marketing channel: The Internet provides an important new channel to sell to consumers.

Limitations and Constraints of E-Commerce

Some disadvantages and constraints of e-commerce include the following.

• Time for delivery of physical products: It is possible to visit a local music store and walk out with a compact disc or a bookstore and leave with a book. E-commerce is often used to buy goods that are not available locally from businesses all over the world, meaning that physical goods need to be delivered, which takes time and costs money. In some cases there are ways around this, for example, with electronic files of the music or books being accessed across the Internet, but then these are not physical goods.

• Physical product, supplier and delivery uncertainty: When you walk out of a shop with an item, it's yours. You have it; you know what it is, where it is and how it looks. In some respects e-commerce purchases are made on trust. This is because, firstly, not having had physical access to the product, a purchase is made on an expectation of what that product is and its condition. Secondly, because supplying businesses can be conducted across the world, it can be uncertain whether or not they are legitimate businesses and are not just going to take your money. It's pretty hard to knock on their door to complain or seek legal recourse! Thirdly, even if the item is sent, it is easy to start wondering whether or not it will ever arrive.

• Perishable goods:. Forget about ordering a single gelato ice cream from a shop in Rome! Though specialized or refrigerated transport can be used, goods bought and sold via the Internet tend to be durable and non-perishable: they need to survive the trip from the supplier to the purchasing business or consumer. This shifts the bias for perishable and/or non-durable goods back towards traditional supply chain arrangements, or towards relatively more local e-commerce-based purchases, sales and distribution. In contrast, durable goods can be traded from almost anyone to almost anyone else, sparking competition for lower prices. In some cases this leads to disintermediation in which intermediary people and businesses are bypassed by consumers and by other businesses that are seeking to purchase more directly from manufacturers.

• Limited and selected sensory information: The Internet is an effective conduit for visual and auditory information: seeing pictures, hearing sounds and reading text. However it does not allow full scope for our senses: we can see pictures of the flowers, but not smell their fragrance; we can see pictures of a hammer, but not feel its weight or balance. Further, when we pick up and inspect something, we choose what we look at and how we look at it. This is not the case on the Internet. If we were looking at buying a car on the Internet, we would see the pictures the seller had chosen for us to see but not the things we might look for if we were able to see it in person. And, taking into account our other senses, we can't test the car to hear the sound of the engine as it changes gears or sense the smell and feel of the leather seats. There are many ways in which the Internet does not convey the richness of experiences of the world. This lack of sensory information means that people are often much more comfortable buying via the Internet generic goods - things that they have seen or experienced before and about which there is little ambiguity, rather than unique or complex things.

• Returning goods: Returning goods online can be an area of difficulty. The uncertainties surrounding the initial payment and delivery of goods can be exacerbated in this process. Will the goods get back to their source? Who pays for the return postage? Will the refund be paid? Will I be left with nothing? How long will it take? Contrast this with the offline experience of returning goods to a shop.

Classifications of E-Commerce Applications

Electronic Commerce (e-Commerce) is a general concept covering any form of business transaction or information exchange executed using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). E-Commerce takes place between companies, between companies and their customers, or between companies and public administrations. Electronic Commerce includes electronic trading of goods, services and electronic material.

E-Commerce systems include commercial transactions on the Internet but their scope is much wider than this; they can be classified by application type:

Electronic Markets:

The principle function of an electronic market is to facilitate the search for the required product or service. Airline booking systems are an example of an electronic market.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI):

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the electronic exchange of business documents in a standard, computer processable, universally accepted format between-trading partners.

EDI is quite different from sending electronic mail, messages or sharing files through a network. In EDI, the computer application of both the sender and the receiver, referred to as Trading Partners (TPs) have to agree upon the format of the business document which is sent as a data file over electronic messaging services.

The two key aspects of EDI that distinguish it from other forms of electronic communication, such as electronic mail, are:

The information transmitted is directly used by the recipient computer without the need for human intervention is rarely mentioned but often assumed that EDI refers to interchange between businesses. It involves two or more organization or parts of organization communicating business information with each other in a common agreed format.

The repeated keying of identical information in the traditional paper-based business.

Communication creates a number of problems that can be significantly reduced through the usage of EDI. These problems include: -

Increased time

Low accuracy

High labour charges

Increased uncertainty.

To take full advantage of EDI’s benefits, a company must computerize its basic business applications. Trading partners are individual organization that agrees to exchange EDI transactions. EDI cannot be undertaken unilaterally but requires the cooperation and active participation of trading partners. Trading partners normally consists of an organization’s principal suppliers and wholesale customers. Since large retail stores transact business with a large number of suppliers they were among the early supporters of EDI. In the manufacturing sector, EDI has enabled the concept of Just-In-Time inventory to be implemented. JIT reduces inventory and operating capital requirements.

EDI provides for the efficient transaction of recurrent trade exchanges between commercial organizations. EDI is widely used by, for example, large retail groups and vehicle assemblers when trading with their suppliers.

Internet Commerce

The Internet (and similar network facilities) can be used for advertising goods and services and transacting one-off deals. Internet commerce has application for both business to- business and business to consumer transactions.

The three categories of E Commerce

Types of e-commerce

There are a number of different types of E-Commerce

B2B - Business to Business

B2C - Business to Consumer

C2B - Consumer to Business

B2E - Business to Employee

C2C - Consumer to Consumer

B2B - Business to Business

E-commerce has been in use for quite a few years and is more commonly known as EDI (electronic data interchange). In the past EDI was conducted on a direct link of some form between the two businesses where as today the most popular connection is the internet. The two businesses pass information electronically to each other. B2B e-commerce currently makes up about 94% of all e-commerce transactions.

Typically in the B2B environment, E-Commerce can be used in the following processes:

Procurement;

order fulfilment;

Managing trading-partner relationships.

B2C - Business to Consumer

Business to Consumer e-commerce is relatively new. This is where the consumer accesses the system of the supplier. It is still a two way function but is usually done solely through the Internet.

B2C can also relate to receiving information such as share prices, insurance quotes, on-line newspapers, or weather forecasts. The supplier may be an existing retail outlet such as a high street store; it has been this type of business that has been successful in using E-Commerce to deliver services to customers. These businesses may have been slow in gearing-up for E-Commerce compared to the innovative dot.com start ups, but they usually have a sound commercial structure as well as in-depth experience of running a business - something which many dotcoms lacked, causing many to fail.

Example: A home user wishes to purchase some good quality wine. The user accesses the Internet site to read a report on the recommended wines. After reading the tasting notes the user follows the links to place an order along with delivery and payment details directly into the merchants’ inventory system. The wine is then dispatched from the supplier’s warehouse and in theory is delivered to the consumer without delay.

C2B - Consumer to Business

Consumer to Business is a growing arena where the consumer requests a specific service from the business. Example: Harry is planning a holiday in Darwin. He requires a flight in the first week of December and is only willing to pay Rs. 250. Harry places a submission with in a web based C2B facility. Dodgy Brothers Airways accesses the facility and sees Harry’s submission. Due to it being a slow period, the airline offers Harry a return fare for Rs. 250.

B2E - Business to Employee

Business to Employee e-commerce is growing in use. This form of E-commerce is more commonly known as an ‘Intranet’. An intranet is a web site developed to provide employees of an organisation with information. The intranet is usually access through the organisations network, it can and is often extended to an Entrant which uses the Internet but restricts uses by sign on and password.

C2C - Consumer to Consumer

These sites are usually some form of an auction site. The consumer lists items for sale with a commercial auction site. Other consumers access the site and place bids on the items. The site then provides a connection between the seller and buyer to complete the transaction. The site provider usually charges a transaction cost. In reality this site should be call C2B2C.

B2A is the least developed area of E-Commerce and it relates to the way that public sector organisations, at both a central and local level, are providing their services on-line. Also known as e-Government, it has the potential to increase the domestic and business use of e-Commerce as traditional services are increasingly being delivered over the Internet. The UK government is committed to ensuring this country is at the forefront of e-Commerce and it is essential that e-Government plays a significant part in achieving this objective.

Scope of E-Commerce

Selling can be focussed to the global customer

Pre-sales, subcontracts, supply

Financing and insurance

Commercial transactions: ordering, delivery, payment

Product service and maintenance

Co-operative product development

Distributed co-operative working

Use of public and private services

Business-to-administrations (e.g. customs, etc)

Transport and logistics

Public procurement

Automatic trading of digital goods

Accounting

Dispute resolution

E- Commerce in Action

How E-Commerce Works

The consumer first moves through the internet to the merchant’s web site. At the web site, the consumer is briefly given an introduction to the product or services the merchant offers. It is at this point that the consumer makes the decision to visit the web store by clicking on a link or button located on the web page (e.g., Buy Now, Shop Online, or an image of a shopping cart button are common entry points into a web store). After choosing to visit the web store, the consumer is typically connected to an online transaction server located somewhere else on the internet which runs software commonly referred to as a shopping cart application. The shopping cart application has been setup by the merchant to display all products and services offered, as well as calculate pricing, taxes, shipping charges, etc.

From there, the consumer decides that he wants to purchase something, so he enters all pertinent credit card information and a sales order is produced. Depending on the ecommerce implementation, the sales order can now take two totally different paths for confirming to the consumer that the order is officially placed.

Scenario 1

The consumer’s credit card information goes directly through a private gateway to a processing network, where the issuing and acquiring banks complete or deny the transaction. This generally takes place in no more than 5-7 seconds and the consumer is then informed that the order was received, the credit card was authorized, and that the product will ultimately be shipped.

Scenario 2

The consumer’s entire order and credit card information is electronically submitted back to the merchant’s server (usually via email, FTP, or SSL connection) where the order can be reviewed first and then approved for credit card authorization through a processing network. The consumer then receives an email shortly afterwards, confirming the order being received, the credit card being authorized, and status on when the product will exactly be shipped.

In both scenarios, the process is transparent to the consumer and appears virtually the same. However, the first scenario is a more simplistic method of setting up a shopping cart application and does not take into consideration any back office issues that may delay shipment (i.e., items out of stock, back orders, orders submitted after office hours or during holidays, etc.). ManageMore’s eCommerce Manager relies on the second scenario to handle all of its ecommerce orders. This second scenario keeps the consumer accurately informed throughout the entire ordering process.

Let us assume an ecommerce implementation that uses the second scenario mentioned above.

There are several basic steps you will need to accomplish before becoming Commerce enabled.

Getting a Merchant Bank Account

Web Hosting

Web Design Considerations

Registering a Domain Name

Obtaining a Digital Certificate

Getting a Merchant Bank Account

In order to be able to accept credit cards, you must apply for an account with a credit card merchant account provider. This can be relatively easy or somewhat difficult, depending on which country you live in, and the type of business you are running.

When choosing a merchant account provider, the following should also be noted:

In order for credit card authorization to be automatic from within ManageMore, you must ensure that your merchant account provider has credit card processors that connect with IC Verify™, PC Charge™, or AuthorizeNet™ (i.e.Intellicharge Interface) software. These products are sold separately from ManageMore and eliminate the need for merchant terminal devices or separate time consuming steps to approve credit cards.

Your merchant account provider must allow you to handle non-swiped credit card transactions. This refers to transactions where the customer is not present and only the credit card number and expiration date are being used for approving the charges.

When choosing a merchant account provider, you should do a little research on the company’s reputation, years in business, and company size. Constantly changing to a new merchant account provider when your old one goes out-of business can be costly and time consuming.

Avoid merchant account providers that ask for a non-refundable fee before you get approved.

Avoid merchant account providers that require 1 or 2 year contract terms. Since there are so many merchant account providers available, it doesn’t make sense to lock your company into a commitment for any period of time.

Expect merchant account providers to have some form of a sign up fee after being approved only. These fees can come in the form of an application fee, processing fee, software fee, etc. Typically expect to pay around $100 to $500 for getting an account setup to accept credit cards and sometimes electronic checks.

You should be able to find a merchant account provider that can offer you discount credit cards rates ranging from 1.75% to 2.75% and no more than .25 cent per transaction. If not, contact Intellisoft regarding our merchant account provider affiliates and the free Intellicharge Interface just for signing up with them.

You will need a dedicated phone line or data line for processing credit cards and electronic checks. Note: If your computer or local area network is already connected to the internet, a separate data line will not be necessary if you use the Intellicharge Interface for electronic payment.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is a very important step in this process, as this is how you gain a presence on the internet in the first place. There are actually two scenarios that can be used for web hosting. Scenario1 involves setting up and maintaining your own web server, while Scenario 2 involves farming out all web hosting administration to an ISP. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a company that provides you with internet access and limited hard drive space on their web servers for hosting your web site.

The following should be noted when searching for an Internet Service Provider:

Always try to find an ISP that can provide a local telephone number for you to connect to the internet.

Choose an ISP that is known for having few interruptions of service.

Choose an ISP that is known for good technical support and has knowledgeable people familiar with ecommerce sites.

Choose an ISP that consistently has fast connection speeds.

As with any company you do business with, make sure the ISP is reputable.

The online transaction providers that offer the actual web store itself can sometimes be hosted by your same ISP or may require a completely different provider, referred to as a Commerce Service Provider (CSP). Many small businesses tend to choose CSP’s for creating a web store because it gives them the flexibility of choosing a provider that offers competitive pricing and the best shopping cart application for their needs. Online transaction providers will usually provide one shopping cart solution they feel is better than the many others that exist and differ by price, appearance, layout, functionality, and ease of use.

The following should be noted when dealing with shopping cart applications:

Online transaction providers will either sell or rent you the use of an online shopping cart application for your business. Be forewarned that purchasing an online shopping cart application is very expensive. Most businesses will rent these online web store programs rather than committing to such a steep investment.

Rental pricing for the use of shopping cart programs vary depending on number of transactions generated a month, number of products listed on the shopping cart application, and the sophistication of the shopping cart application itself.

There are a lot of online transaction providers out there, and they all have varying packages. Deciding on a provider’s package that fits your needs is perhaps the most important aspect.

Web Design Considerations

With little knowledge of HTML and a lot of patience, you can probably create your own corporate web site with the help of products like Microsoft FrontPage™ or DreamWeaver™. However, when adding a web store to your web site, you may want to seek the help of professional web designers to make the look and feel of your web store consistent with the rest of your corporate web site. Most shopping cart applications, like SoftCart by Mercantec, allow its templates to be modified just for this purpose. In many cases, the same ISP or CSP you choose can provide web design and consultation.

Registering a Domain Name

Domain names are the names for computers on the Internet that correspond to IP (Internet protocol) numbers to route information to addresses on the Internet network. Domain names serve as a convenient way of locating information and people on the Internet. In layman terms, will it be important to you, for customers to find your web site by typing “123.123.456.456” or by typing something simple to remember like

Registering a domain name is one of the most important decisions you can make for your online identity. Your domain name says who you are to your clients, your peers - the whole world. The basics for registering a domain name are:

Contact a domain name registrar on the internet to register for a domain name.There are many to choose from, just do a web search on “domain name registrar” to get you started.

2. Select a unique domain name you would like others to use for finding your web site.

Obtaining a Digital Certificate

A digital certificate, also known as a SSL Server Certificate, enables SSL (Secure Socket Layer encryption) on the web server. SSL protects communications so you can take credit card orders securely and ensure that hackers cannot eavesdrop on you. Any ecommerce company that provides you with an online web store will require you to have SSL before you can use their services. Thankfully, for most people obtaining a digital certificate is not a problem. For a minimal fee, one can usually use the certificate owned by the web hosting company where your page resides. If you are a larger company, however, you may want to get your own digital certificate.

Architectural Framework of E Commerce

A framework is intended to define and create tools that integrate the information found in today’s closed systems and allows the development of e-commerce applications. It is important to understand that the aim of the architectural frame-work itself is not to build new database management systems, data repository, computer languages, software agent based transaction monitors, or communication protocols. Rather, the architecture should focus on synthesizing the diverse resources already in place in corporations to facilitate the integration of data and software for better applications. The electronic commerce application architecture consists of six layers of functionality, or services:

applications;

brokerage services, data or transaction management;

interface, and; support layers”

secure messaging, security and electronic document interchange;

middle ware and structured document interchange; and

network infrastructure and basic communications services.

These layers co-operate to provide a seamless transition between today’s computing resources and those of tomorrow by transparently integrating information access and exchange within the context of the chosen application. As seen in Fig., electronic commerce applications are based on several elegant technologies. But only when they are integrated do they provide uniquely powerful solutions.

In the ensuing discussion of each of these layers, we will not elaborate on the various aspects of the network infrastructure that transports information. These were discussed extensively earlier and will not be addressed here. We begin our discussion with the application level services.

Table Electronic Commerce: A conceptual framework

Electronic Commerce Application Services

The application services layer of e-commerce will be comprised of existing and future applications built on the innate architecture. Three distinct classes of electronic commerce application can be distinguished: customer to business, business-to-business, and intra organization

Consumer-to-Business Transactions

We call this category marketplace transaction. In a marketplace transaction, customers learn about products differently through electronic publishing, buy them differently using electronic cash and secure payment systems, and have them delivered differently.

Also, how customers allocate their loyalty may also be different. In light of this, the organization itself has to adapt to a world where the traditional concepts of brand

Differentiation no longer hold-where “quality” has a new meaning, where “content” may not be equated to “product,” Where “distribution” may not automatically mean “physical Transport.” In this new environment, brand equity can rapidly evaporate forcing firms to develop new ways of doing business

Business-to Business Transactions

We call this category market-link transaction. Here, businesses, governments, and other organizations depend on computer - to-computer communication as a fast, an economical, and a dependable way to conduct business’ transactions. Small companies are also beginning to see the benefits of adopting the same methods. Business-to-business transactions include the use of EDI and electronic mail for purchasing goods and services,buying information and consulting services, submitting requests for proposals, and receiving proposals. Examine this scenario.

The current accounts payable process occurs through the exchange of paper documents. Each year the trading partners exchange millions of invoices, checks, purchase orders, financial reports, and other transactions. Most of the documents are in electronic form at their point of origin but are printed and key-entered at the point of receipt. The current manual process of printing, mailing is costly, time consuming, and error-prone. Given this situation and faced with the need to reduce costs, small businesses are looking toward electronic commerce as a possible savior. Intra-organizational Transactions We call this category market-driven transactions. A company becomes market driven by dispersing throughout the firm information about its customers and competitors; by spreading strategic and tactical decision making so that all units can participate; and by continuously monitoring their customer commitment by making improved customer satisfaction an ongoing objective. To maintain the relationships that are critical to delivering superior customer value, management must pay close attention to service, both before and after sales. In essence, a market-driven business develops a comprehensive understanding of its customers’ business and how customers in the immediate and downstream markets perceive value.

Three major components of market-driven transactions are

customer orientation through product and service

customization; cross-functional coordination through enterprise

integration; and advertising, marketing, and customer service.

Information Brokerage and Management

The information brokerage and management layer provides service integration through the notion of information brokerages, the development of which is necessitated by the increasing information resource fragmentation. We use the notion of information brokerage to represent an intermediary who provides service integration between customers and information providers, given some constraint such as a low price, fast service, or profit maximization for a client. Information brokers, for example, are rapidly becoming necessary in dealing with the voluminous amounts of information on the networks. As on-line databases migrate to consumer information utilities, consumers and information professionals will have to keep up with the knowledge, and owner-ship of all these systems.

Most professionals have enough trouble keeping track of files of 1 interest on one or two database services. With all the complexity associated with large numbers of on-line databases and service bureaus, if it is impossible to expect humans to do the searching. It will have to be software programs-information brokers or software agents, to use the more popular term-that act on the searcher’s behalf. Information brokerage does more than just searching. It addresses the issue of adding value to the information that is retrieved. For instance, in foreign exchange trading, information is retrieved about the latest currency exchange rates in order to hedge currency holdings to minimize risk and maximize profit. In other words, the act of retrieving the information is the input to other transactions. With multiple transactions being the norm in the real world, service integration becomes critical.

Taking the same foreign exchange example further, service integration allows one to link the hedging program (offered on a time-sharing basis by a third party) with the search program (could be another vendor) that finds the currency rates from the cheapest on-line service to automatically send trades to the bank or financial services company. In effect, a personalized automated trading system can be created without having to go to any financial institution. This is just one example of how information brokerages can add value. Another aspect of the brokerage function is the support for data management and traditional transaction services. Brokerages may provide tools to accomplish more sophisticated, time-delayed updates or future compensating transactions. These tools include software agents, distributed query generator, the distributed transaction generator, and the declarative resource constraint base which describes a business’s rules and-environment information.

At the heart of this layer lies the work-flow scripting environment built on a software agent model that coordinates work and data flow among support services. As pointed out earlier, software agents are used to implement information brokerages. Software agents are mobile programs that have been called “healthy viruses,” “digital butlers/” and “intelligent agents.” Agents are encapsulations of users’ instruction that perform all kinds of tasks in electronic market places spread across networks.

Information brokerages dispatch agents capable of information resource gathering, negotiating deals, and performing transactions. The agents are intelligent because they have contingency plans of action. They examine themselves and their environment and if necessary change from their original course of action to an alternative plan. For example, suppose you send an agent to an on-line store with a request to order a bouquet of roses for Rs. 25 or less. If the shop offers roses starting at Rs. 30, your agent can either choose a different bouquet or find a different store by consulting an online

“Yellow Pages” directory, depending on prior instructions. Although the notion of software agents sounds very seductive, it will take a while to solve the problems of interregna communication, interoperable agents, and other headaches that come with distributed computing and net-working. To some critics, the prospect of a single-agent language like Telescript as a world standard is disturbing. They worry that agents sound a bit too much like computer viruses, which instead of running errands may run amok.

Vendors such as General Magic go to great lengths to explain the precautions it has taken to make this impossible: the limits placed on the power of agents, the “self-destruct” mechanism built into their codes. Yet until electronic commerce services are up and running on a large scale, it is impossible to know how well software agents will work.

Interface and Support Services

The third layer, interface and support services will provide interfaces for electronic commerce applications such as interactive catalogs and will sup-port directory servicesfunctions necessary for information search and access. These two concepts are very different.

Interactive catalogs are the customized interface to consumer applications such as home shopping. An interactive catalog is an extension of the paper-based catalog and incorporates additional features such as sophisticated graphics and video to make the advertising more attractive. Directories, on the other hand, operate behind the scenes and attempt to organize the enormous amount of information and transactions generated to facilitate electronic commerce. Directory services databases make data from any server appear as a local file. A classic example of a directory is the telephone White Pages, which allows us to locate people and telephone numbers. In the case of electronic commerce, directories would play an important role in information management functions.

For instance,take the case of buying an airline ticket with several stopovers with the caveat that the time between layovers be minimized. This search would require several queries to various online directories to-find empty seats on various airlines and then the avail-ability of seats would; be coordinated with the amount of time spent in the air-port terminals. The primary difference between the two is that unlike interactive catalogs, which deal with people, directory support services interact directly with soft-ware applications. For this reason, they need not have the multimedia glitter and jazz generally associated with interactive catalogs. From a computing perspective, we can expect that there will be no one common user interface that will glaze the surface of all electronic commerce applications, but graphics and object manipulation will definitely dominate. Tool developers and designers might incorporate common tools for interface building, but the shape of catalogs or directories will depend on the users’ desires and functional requirements.

Secure Messaging and Structured Document Interchange Services

The importance of the fourth layer, secured messaging, is clear. Everyone in business knows that electronic messaging is a critical business issue. Consider a familiar business scenario:

You hand over an urgent fax Monday and find out Tuesday that it’s still sitting on your fax operator’s desk. What happened?

The line was busy and he thought he’d try again later. Or, the number was wrong,but he forgot to let you know. Or you’re in London and you need to send a spreadsheet that details a marketing plan for a product introduction strategy to a co-worker in New York. This must be done today, not tomorrow when the courier service would deliver.

There is a solution to these common and frustrating problems. It’s called Integrated Messaging: a group of computer services that through the use of a network send, receive, and combine messages, faxes, and large data files. Some better-known examples are electronic mail, enhanced fax, and electronic data interchange.

Broadly defined, messaging is the software that sits between the network infrastructure and the clients or electronic commerce applications, masking the peculiarities of the environment. Others define messaging as a frame-work for the total implementation of portable applications, divorcing you from the architectural primitives of your system. In general, messaging products are not applications that solve problems; they are more enablers of the applications that solve problems. Messaging services offer solutions for communicating non formatted (unstructured) data-letters, memos, and reports as weft asformatted (structured) data such as purchase orders, shipping notices, and invoices. Unstructured messaging consists of fax, e-mail, and form-based systems like Lotus Notes.

Structured documents messaging consist of the automated inter-change of standardized and approved messages between computer applications, via telecommunications lines. Examples of structured document messaging include EDI. Messaging is gaining momentum in electronic commerce and seems to have many advantages. It supports both synchronous (immediate) and asynchronous (delayed) message delivery and processing. With asynchronous messaging, when a message is sent, work continues (software doesn’t wait for a response).This allows the transfer of messages through store-and-forward methods.

Another advantage of messaging is that it is not associated with any particular communication protocol. No pre-processing is necessary, although there is an increasing need for programs to interpret the message. Messaging is well suited for both client server and peer-to-peer computing models. In distributed systems, the messages are treated as “objects” that pass between systems.

Messaging is central to work-group computing that is changing the way businesses operate. The ability to access the right information at the right time across diverse work groups is a challenge. Today, with the messaging tools, people can communicate and work together more effectively-no matter where they are located. When an employee sends an electronic mail form, the information travels along with the form. So one person can start the form, mail it to the next person, fill it in/ sign it, mail it to the next, and so on. This is known as message-enabled work-flow solutions.

The main disadvantages of messaging are the new types of applications it enables which appear to be more complex, especially to traditional programmers and the jungle of standards it involves. Because of the lack of standards, there is often no interoperability between different messaging vendors leading to islands of messaging. Also, security, privacy, and confidentiality through data encryption and authentication techniques are important issues that need to be resolved for ensuring the legality of the message-based transactions themselves.

Middleware Services

Middleware is a relatively new concept that emerged only recently. Like so many other innovations, it came into being out of necessity. Users in the 1970s, when vendors, delivered homogeneous systems that worked, didn’t have a need for middleware3&heR conditions changed-along with the hardware and the software the organizations couldn’t cope: The tools were inadequate, the backlog was enormous, and the pressure was overwhelming. And, the users were dissatisfied. Something was needed to solve all the interface, translation, transformation, and interpretation problems that were driving application developers crazy. With the growth of networks, client-server technology, and all other forms of communicating between/among unlike platforms, the problems of getting all the pieces to work together grew from formidable to horrendous.

As the cry for distributed computing spread, users demanded interaction between dissimilar systems, networks that permitted shared resources and applications that could be accessed by multiple software programs. In simple terms, middleware is the ultimate mediator between diverse software pro-grams that enables them talk to one another. Another reason for middleware is the computing shift from application centric to data centric. That is, remote data controls all of the applications in the network instead of applications controlling data. To achieve data-centric computing, middleware services focus on three elements: transparency, transaction security and management, and distributed object management and services.

Transparency

Transparency implies that users should be unaware that they are accessing multiple systems. Transparency is essential for dealing with higher-level issues than physical media and interconnection that the underlying network infrastructure is in charge of. The ideal picture is one of a “virtual” network: a collection of workgroup, departmental, enterprise, and inter enterprise LANs that appears to the end user or client application to be a seamless and easily accessed whole.

Transparency is accomplished using middleware that facilitates a distributed computing environment. This gives users and applications transparent access to data, computation, and other resources across collections of multi-vendor, heterogeneous systems. The strategic architectures of every major system vendor are now based on some form of middleware. The key to realizing the theoretical benefit of such architecture is transparency. Users need not spend their time trying to understand where something is. Nor should application developers have to code into their applications the exact locations of resources over the network. The goal is for the applications to send a request to the middleware layer, which then satisfies the request any way it can, using remote information.

Transaction Security and Management

Support for transaction processing (TP) is fundamental to success in the electronic commerce market. Security and management are essential to all layers in the electronic commerce model. At the transaction security level, two broad general categories of security services exist: authentication and authorization.

Transaction integrity must be a given for businesses that cannot afford any loss or inconsistency in data. Some commercial sites have had gigantic centralized TP systems running for years. For electronic commerce, middleware provides the qualities expected in a standard TP sys-tem: the so-called ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability).

Distributed Object Management and Services

Object orientation is proving fundamental to the proliferation of network-based applications for the following reasons: It is too hard to write a net-work-based application without either extensive developer retraining or a technology that camouflages the intricacies of the network. Objects are defined as the combination of data and instructions acting on the data. Objects are an evolution of the more traditional programming concept of functions and procedures. A natural instance of an object in electronic commerce is a document.

A document carries data and often carries instructions about the actions to be performed on the data. Today, the term object is being used interchangeably with document resulting in a new form of computing called document oriented computing. Here, the trend is to move away from single data-type documents such as text, pictures, or video toward integrated documents known as com-pound document architectures. The best example of this approach is an active document. If you create a new document that is an integration of the spreadsheet, word processor, and presentation package, what you’ll see in the next generation of operating systems is that as you scroll through your document, the tool bar will automatically change from a spreadsheet too bar,to a word processing tool bar, to a presentation package tool bar. These applications will also be able to access and retrieve data from any file in the computing network.

Advantages of E-Commerce

Electronic Commerce can increase sales and decrease costs.

Advertising done well on the web can get even a small firm’s promotional message out to potential customers in every country in the world.

Businesses can use electronic commerce to identify new suppliers and business partners.

Electronic Commerce increases the speed and accuracy with which businesses can exchange information, which reduces costs on both sides of transactions.

E-Commerce provides buyers with a wider range of choices than traditional commerce because buyers can consider many different products and services from a wider variety of sellers.

Electronic payments of tax refunds, public retirement and welfare support cost less to issue and arrive securely and quickly when transmitted over the Internet.

Disadvantages of E-Commerce

Some business processes such as perishable foods and high-cost, unique items such as custom-designed jewelry might be impossible to inspect adequately from a remote location.

Costs, which are a function of technology, can change dramatically even during short-lived electronic commerce implementation projects because the technologies are changing so rapidly.

Many firms have trouble recruiting and retaining employees with the technological, design and business process skills needed to create an effective electronic commerce presence.

Firms facing difficulty of integrating existing databases and transaction processing software designed for traditional commerce into the software that enables electronic commerce.

Companies that offer software design and consulting services to tie existing systems into new online business systems can be expensive.

Consumers are fearful of sending their credit card numbers over the Internet and having online merchants. Consumers are simply resistant to change and are uncomfortable viewing merchandise on a computer screen rather than in person.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF TRANSACTING ONLINE

As well as disadvantages, online payment methods have several advantages. Read these examples:

Low labour costs

Since online payments are usually automatic, they have lower labour costs than manual payment methods, such as cheque, money order, cash and EFTPOS.

Convenience for online sales

Online payment methods allow conveniently selling goods and services online.

Automatic

Online payments can be automatic, which can be convenient for you and your customers.

Fast transaction speed

Online transactions quickly provide feedback to you and your customers.

Low risk of theft

After processing delays, online payments generally go straight into your bank account, so they have a low risk of theft.

Disadvantages of online payments

Online payment methods have several disadvantages. Check out these examples:

Service fees

Payment gateways and third-party payment processors charge service fees.

Inconvenient for offline sales

Online payment methods are inconvenient for offline sales.

Vulnerability to cybercriminals

Cybercriminals can disable online payment methods or exploit them to steal people’s money or information. Visit the Australian Cybercrime Reporting Network’s Learn about cybercrime page to learn more about cybercrime.

Reliance on telecommunication infrastructure

Internet and server problems can disable online payment methods.

Technical problems

Online payment methods can go down due to technical problems.

Processing online payments

Online payments are usually automatic. Check out this example:

Your business has a website with online purchase facilities to sell your goods and services.

A customer visits your website and finds some products they want to buy.

The customer checks out the products from your website and goes to the payments section.

Your website lets your customer know the total cost of the products they want to buy as well as their payment options.

The customer selects and completes their preferred payment method.

Your website automatically sends your confirmation of payment to you and your customer and sends a request to your business to ship the product.

Your website automatically gives your customer a receipt and/or a GST tax invoice. If GST applies, you must provide a GST tax invoice within 28 days if your customer requests one.

Tips for using online payment methods

If you want to offer online payments, try some these tips:

Protect customer information

Only retain credit and debit card information if you need it. Make sure you have good security to protect any information you retain.

Shop around

Look for the best payment gateway provider or third party payment processor for your business.

Use encryption

Make sure you use encryption for sending payment information to and from your website to protect your customers’ information from cybercriminals.

Train your employees

If your employees handle online payments, make sure they are properly trained in managing the online payments system and in keeping customer payment details secure.

Key elements of a business model

8 Key elements of a business model that you need to pay attention to

1) Value Proposition

Define how a company’s product or service fufils the need of customers.

-Examples of successful value propositions

 -Personalization/ Customization

 -Reduction of product search, price discovery costs

 -Facilitation of transactions by managing product delivery

2) Revenue Model

Define how the firm will earn revenue generates profits and produce a superior return on invested capital

-Major types:

Advertising revenue models: CNN.com

Subscription revenue models: MATCH.com

Transaction fee revenue model: EBay, E-Trade, Hotwire

Sales revenue model: Amazon, LLbean, Gap.com

Affiliate revenue model: E-pinions, Banner Exchange, Edmunds  sends traffic to another website

3) Market Opportunity

Refers to a company’s intended market space and the overall potential financial opportunities available to the firm in that market space

4) Competitive Environment

Refers to the other competition selling similar products and operating in the same market space

-Influenced by

How many competitors are active

How large operations are

The market share for each competitor

How profitable these firms are

How they price their product

5) Competitive Advantage

Achieved when a firm can produce a superior product and/or bring a product to market, at a lower price than most, or all, of their competitors.

-Types of competitive advantage:

First mover advantage

Unfair competitive advantage

6) Market Strategy

Plan that details how a company intends to enter a new market and attract strategy

7) Organizational Development

Describes how the company will organize the work that needs to be accomplished

8) Management Team

Employees of the company responsible for making the business model work

-Strong management team gives instant credibility to outside investors

There are many types of e-commerce business models lets take a look at all of them and what are the difference.

Business to Consumer Models

Portal

Offers powerful search tools plus an integrated packages of content and services

typically utilize a combined subscription/ advertising revenues/ transaction fee model

E-tailer

Online version of traditional retailer

Types include:

-Virtual merchants: Amazon

-Bricks and Clicks: Borders, Wal-Mart

-Catalogue merchants: LL Bean

- Manufacturer- direct: Dell.com, Sony Style

Content Provider

Information and entertainment companies that provide digital content over the web

Typically utilizes a subscription, pay for download or advertising revenue model

Syndication a variation of standard content provider model

Transaction Broker

 Processes online transactions for consumers

 Primary value proposition- saving time and money

 Pay Pal

 Typical revenue model – transaction fee

Market Creator

 Uses internet technology to create markets that bring buyers and sellers together

 E.g. priceline.com & ebay.com

Service Provider

Offers service online

Value proposition: valuable, convenient, time-saving, low cost alternatives to traditional service providers

Visa Now

Revenue Model: Subscription fees or one-time payment

Community Provider

Sites that create a digital online environment where people with similar interest can transact, communicate and receive interest-related information

Angie’s List

Typically rely on hybrid revenue model

Business to Business Models

E-distributor

Supplies products and services directly to individual businesses

Owned by one company seeking to serve many customers

E-procurement

Creates and sells access to digital electronic markets

B2B services providers is one type

Application service providers: a subset of B2B service providers

Exchanges

Electronic digital marketplace where suppliers and commercial purchases can conduct transactions

Usually owned by independent firms whose business is making a market

Industry Consortia

Industry-owned vertical market place that serve specific industries

Horizontal market place, in contrast, sell specific products and services to a whole range of industries

Private industrial networks

Digital networks designed to co-ordinate the flow of communications among firms engaged in business together

Lobbying: influence the government as a group  Public policy access

Business models in emerging E-Commerce Areas

Consumer to consumer: Provides a way for consumers to sell to each other, with the help of online market maker (EBay)

Peer to peer (P2P): Link users, enabling them to share files and common resources without a common server (Kazaa, Cloudmark)

M-Commerce: E-commerce business models that use wireless technologies (EBay Mobile)—To date, m-commerce is a disappointment in the united states however, technology platform continues to evolve

Forces Behind E-commerce

E-Commerce is becoming popular, it is worthwhile to examine today’s business environment so let us understand the pressures it creates on organizations and the responses used by organizations.

Environmental factors that create Business Pressures:

Market, economical, societal and technological factors are creating a highly competitive business environment in which consumers are the focal point. These factors change quickly, sometimes in an unpredictable manner and therefore companies need to react frequently not only in the traditional actions such as lowering cost and closing unprofitable facilities but also innovative activities such as customizing products, creating new products or providing superb customer service.

Economic Forces One of the most evident benefits of e-commerce is economic efficiency resulting from the reduction in communications costs, low-cost technological infrastructure,speedier and more economic electronic transactions with suppliers,lower global information sharing and advertising costs,and cheaper customer service alternatives.

Categories of Economic Forces

Lower marketing costs: marketing on the Internet maybe cheaper and can reach a wider crowd than the normal marketing medium.

Lower sales costs: increase in the customer volume do not need an increase in staff as the sales function is housed in the computer and has virtually unlimited accessibility

Lower ordering processing cost: online ordering can be automated with checks to ensure that orders are correct before accepting, thus reducing errors and the cost of correcting them.

New sales opportunities: the website is accessible all the time and reaches the global audience which is not possible with traditional store front.

Economic integration is either external or internal. External integration refers to the electronic networking of corporations, suppliers, customers/clients, and independent contractors into one community communicating in a virtual environment (with the Internet as medium). Internal integration, on the other hand, is the networking of the various departments within a corporation, and of business operations and processes. This allows critical business information to be stored in a digital form that can be retrieved instantly and transmitted electronically. Internal integration is best exemplified by corporate intranets.

Among the companies with efficient corporate intranets are Procter and Gamble, IBM, Nestle and Intel. EG. SESAMi.NET: Linking Asian Markets through B2B Hubs SESAMi.NET is Asia’s largest B2B e-hub, a virtual exchange integrating and connecting businesses (small, medium or large) to trading partners, e-marketplaces and internal enterprise systems for the purpose of sourcing out supplies, buying and selling goods and services online in real time. The e-hub serves as the centre for management of content and the processing of business transactions with support services such as financial clearance and information services.

It is strategically and dynamically linked to the Global Trading Web (GTW), the world’s largest network of trading communities on the Internet. Because of this very important link, SESAMi reaches an extensive network of regional, vertical and industry-specific interoperable B2B e-markets across the globe.

Market Forces

Corporations are encouraged to use e-commerce in marketing and promotion to capture international markets, both big and small. The Internet is likewise used as a medium for enhanced customer service and support. It is a lot easier for companies to provide their target consumers with more detailed product and service information using the Internet. Strong competition between organizations, extremely low labor cost in some countries, frequent and significant changes in markets and increased power of consumers are the reasons to create market forces.

Technology Forces

The development of information and communications technology (ICT) is a key factor in the growth of ecommerce. For instance, technological advances in digitizing content, compression and the promotion of open systems technology have paved the way for the convergence of communication services into one single platform. This in turn has made communication more efficient, faster, easier, and more economical as the need to set up separate networks for telephone services, television broadcast, cable television, and Internet access is eliminated. From the standpoint of firms/ businesses and consumers, having only one information provider means lower communications costs.

Moreover, the principle of universal access can be made more achievable with convergence. At present the high costs of installing landlines in sparsely populated rural areas is incentive to telecommunications companies to install telephones in these areas. Installing landlines in rural areas can become more attractive to the private sector if revenues from these landlines are not limited to local and long distance telephone charges, but also include cable TV and Internet charges. This development will ensure affordable access to information even by those in rural areas and will spare the government the trouble and cost of installing expensive landlines

Societal and environmental forces

To understand the role of E-commerce in today’s organizations, it becomes necessary to review the factors that create societal and environmental forces.

Changing nature of workforce

Government deregulations

Shrinking government subsidies

Increased importance of ethical and legal issues

Increased social responsibility of organizations

Rapid political changes

Critical response activities by Organizations

A response can be a reaction to a pressure already in existence, or it can be an initiative that will defend an organization against future pressures. It can also be an activity that exploits an opportunity created by changing conditions.

Organizations’ major responses are divided into five categories:strategic systems for competitive advantage,continuous improvement efforts, business process reengineering (BPR), business alliances and EC.These several responses can be interrelated and Ecommerce can also facilitate the other categories. The four categories are described below.

Strategic Systems

Strategic systems provide organizations with strategic advantages, thus enabling them to increase their market share, better negotiate with their suppliers, or prevent competitors from entering into their territory. There is a variety of EC supported strategic systems. An example is FedEx’s overnight delivery system and the company’s ability to track the status of every individual package anywhere in the system. Most of FedEx’s competitors have already mimicked the system. So FedEx moved the system to the Internet. However, the competitors quickly followed and now FedEx is introducing new activities.

Continuous Improvement Efforts

In order to improve the company’s productivity and quality, many companies continuously conduct innovative programs. The efforts taken by companies for continuous improvement are

Improved productivity

Improved decision making

Managing Information

Change in management

Customer service Innovation and

Creativity.

For example, Dell Computer takes its orders electronically and improved moves them via Enterprise Resources Planning software (from SAP Corp.) into the just-in-time assembly operation. Intel is taking its products’ consumption in 11 of its largest customers, using its extranets, almost in real time, and determining production schedules and deliveries accordingly.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Business Process Reengineering refers to a major innovation in the organization’s structure and the way it conducts business. Information technology and especially EC play a major role in BPR. Electronic Commerce provides flexibility in manufacturing, permits faster delivery to customers and supports rapid and paperless transactions among suppliers, manufacturers and retailers.

The major areas in which E-Commerce supports BPR are

Reducing cycle time and time to market: Reducing the business process time (cycle time) is extremely important for increasing productivity and competitiveness.Similarly, reducing the time from the inception of an idea until its implementation— time to market—is important because those who can be first on the market with a product, or who can provide customers with a service faster than competitors, enjoy a distinct competitive advantage.

Empowerment of employees and collaborative work: Empowerment is related to the concept of self-directed teams. Management delegates authority to teams who can execute the work faster and with fewer delays. Information Technology allows the decentralization of decision making and authority but simultaneously supports a centralized control. For example, the Internet and the intranets enable empowered employees to access data, information and knowledge they need for making quick decisions.

Knowledge management: Employees can access organizational know-how via their company’s intranet. Some knowledge bases are open to the public for a fee over the Internet, generating income.

Customer-focused approach: Companies are becoming increasingly customer oriented. This can be done in part by changing manufacturing processes from mass production to mass customization. In mass production, a company produces a large quantity of identical items. In mass customization, items are produced in a large quantity but are customized to fit the desires of each customer. Electronic commerce is an ideal facilitator of mass customization.

Business alliances

Many companies realize that alliances with other companies, even competitors can be beneficial. There are several types of alliances, such as sharing resources, establishing permanent supplier-company relationships and creating joint research efforts. One of the most interesting types is the temporary joint venture, in which companies form a special organization for a specific, limited-time mission.

E-Commerce Communities

What it is that will drive e-commerce in the future? — in a word, it’s community.

We certainly have the technology to build great business-to-consumer and business-to business ecommerce applications into our business models. And, yes, attributes such as viable application design, integration with business processes, and overall performance matter.

A successful community strategy must embrace the idea of moving the one-onone communication that occurs offline into the virtual world of e-commerce. Such a strategy currently requires multiple technical approaches. However, we believe community solutions will soon become more integrated and far-reaching.

The tools that form online communities include discussion or forum software, chat functions, instant messaging, two-way mailing lists, online collaboration tools, audio, video, and more. You may choose to invest slowly at first and increase your community commitment over time.

Online conversation with business partners will also give net positive results. A private discussion area or secured online meetings can go a long way toward building stronger relationships between companies. This will also serve to potentially drive new business opportunities for both parties. Building community has to be at the heart of any successful ecommerce strategy.

Is e-Commerce the Same as e-Business?

While some use e-commerce and e-business interchangeably, they are distinct concepts. In e-commerce, information and communications technology (ICT) is used in inter-business or inter-organizational transactions (transactions between and among firms/ organizations) and in business-to-consumer transactions (transactions between firms/ organizations and individuals).

In e-business, on the other hand, ICT is used to enhance one’s business. It includes any process that a business organization (either a for-profit, governmental or non-profit entity) conducts over a computer-mediated network. A more comprehensive definition of e-business is: “The transformation of an organization’s processes to deliver additional customer value through the application of technologies, philosophies and computing paradigm of the new economy.”

Three primary processes are enhanced in e-business:

1. Production processes, which include procurement, ordering and replenishment of stocks; processing of payments; electronic links with suppliers; and production control processes, among others;

2. Customer-focused processes, which include promotional and marketing efforts, selling over the Internet, processing of customers’ purchase orders and payments, and customer support, among others; and

3. Internal management processes, which include employee services, training, internal information-sharing, videoconferencing, and recruiting. Electronic applications enhance information flow between production and sales forces to improve sales force productivity. Workgroup communications and electronic publishing of internal business information are likewise made more efficient. The Internet economy pertains to all economic activities using electronic networks as a medium for commerce or those activities involved in both building the networks linked to the Internet and the purchase of application services such as the provision of enabling hardware and software and network equipment for Web-based/online retail and shopping malls (or “e-malls”).

DESIGNING ECOMMERCE WEBSITE

Forces Behind E-commerce

E-Commerce is becoming popular, it is worthwhile to examine today’s business environment so let us understand the pressures it creates on organizations and the responses used by organizations.

Environmental factors that create Business Pressures:

Categories of Economic Forces

Lower marketing costs: marketing on the Internet maybe cheaper and can reach a wider crowd than the normal marketing medium.

Lower sales costs: increase in the customer volume do not need an increase in staff as the sales function is housed in the computer and has virtually unlimited accessibility

Lower ordering processing cost: online ordering can be automated with checks to ensure that orders are correct before accepting, thus reducing errors and the cost of correcting them.

New sales opportunities: the website is accessible all the time and reaches the global audience which is not possible with traditional store front.

Market Forces

Technology Forces

Societal and environmental forces

To understand the role of E-commerce in today’s organizations, it becomes necessary to review the factors that create societal and environmental forces.

Changing nature of workforce

Government deregulations

Shrinking government subsidies

Increased importance of ethical and legal issues

Increased social responsibility of organizations

Rapid political changes

Critical response activities by Organizations

Strategic Systems

Continuous Improvement Efforts

In order to improve the company’s productivity and quality, many companies continuously conduct innovative programs. The efforts taken by companies for continuous improvement are

Improved productivity

Improved decision making

Managing Information

Change in management

Customer service Innovation and

Creativity.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

The major areas in which E-Commerce supports BPR are

Knowledge management: Employees can access organizational know-how via their company’s intranet. Some knowledge bases are open to the public for a fee over the Internet, generating income.

Business alliances

E-Commerce Communities

What it is that will drive e-commerce in the future? — in a word, it’s community.

Is e-Commerce the Same as e-Business?

Three primary processes are enhanced in e-business:

1. Production processes, which include procurement, ordering and replenishment of stocks; processing of payments; electronic links with suppliers; and production control processes, among others;

shopping malls (or “e-malls”).

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (aka. the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separate but related things.

What is The Internet?

The internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the internet. Information that travels over the internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

Quick Points about The Internet:

It is a global network connecting millions of computers.

The internet is decentralized.

Each internet computer is independent.

There are a variety of ways to access the internet.

There are more than 3.5 billion internet users in the world.

What is The Web (World Wide Web)?

The World Wide Web, or simply web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the internet. The web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the web to share information. The web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called webpages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.

Quick Points about The Web:

It is a system of internet servers that support specially formatted documents.

Documents are formatted in a markup language that supports links to other documents.

You can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots (hyperlinks).

Applications called web browsers that make it easy to access the World Wide Web.

There are more than 1,275,000,000 websites.

The Web is a Portion of The Internet

The web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the internet. The internet, not the web, is also used for email, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET AND WWW

Evolution

World Wide Web was created by Timothy Berners Lee in 1989 at CERN in Geneva. World Wide Web came into existence as a proposal by him, to allow researchers to work together effectively and efficiently at CERN. Eventually it became World Wide Web.

The following diagram briefly defines evolution of World Wide Web:

WWW Architecture

WWW architecture is divided into several layers as shown in the following diagram:

Identifiers and Character Set

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is used to uniquely identify resources on the web and UNICODE makes it possible to built web pages that can be read and write in human languages.

Syntax

XML (Extensible Markup Language) helps to define common syntax in semantic web.

Data Interchange

Resource Description Framework (RDF) framework helps in defining core representation of data for web. RDF represents data about resource in graph form.

Taxonomies

RDF Schema (RDFS) allows more standardized description of taxonomies and other ontological constructs.

Ontologies

Web Ontology Language (OWL) offers more constructs over RDFS. It comes in following three versions:

OWL Lite for taxonomies and simple constraints.

OWL DL for full description logic support.

OWL for more syntactic freedom of RDF

Rules

RIF and SWRL offers rules beyond the constructs that are available from RDFs and OWL. Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is SQL like language used for querying RDF data and OWL Ontologies.

Proof

All semantic and rules that are executed at layers below Proof and their result will be used to prove deductions.

Cryptography

Cryptography means such as digital signature for verification of the origin of sources is used.

User Interface and Applications

On the top of layer User interface and Applications layer is built for user interaction.

WWW Operation

WWW works on client- server approach. Following steps explains how the web works:

User enters the URL (say, http://www.tutorialspoint.com) of the web page in the address bar of web browser.

Then browser requests the Domain Name Server for the IP address corresponding to www.tutorialspoint.com.

After receiving IP address, browser sends the request for web page to the web server using HTTP protocol which specifies the way the browser and web server communicates.

Then web server receives request using HTTP protocol and checks its search for the requested web page. If found it returns it back to the web browser and close the HTTP connection.

Now the web browser receives the web page, It interprets it and display the contents of web page in web browser’s window.

Future

There had been a rapid development in field of web. It has its impact in almost every area such as education, research, technology, commerce, marketing etc. So the future of web is almost unpredictable.

Apart from huge development in field of WWW, there are also some technical issues that W3 consortium has to cope up with.

User Interface

Work on higher quality presentation of 3-D information is under deveopment. The W3 Consortium is also looking forward to enhance the web to full fill requirements of global communities which would include all regional languages and writing systems.

Technology

Work on privacy and security is under way. This would include hiding information, accounting, access control, integrity and risk management.

Architecture

There has been huge growth in field of web which may lead to overload the internet and degrade its performance. Hence more better protocol are required to be developed.

Web Page

web page is a document available on world wide web. Web Pages are stored on web server and can be viewed using a web browser.

A web page can cotain huge information including text, graphics, audio, video and hyper links. These hyper links are the link to other web pages.

Collection of linked web pages on a web server is known as website. There is unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is associated with each web page.

Static Web page

Static web pages are also known as flat or stationary web page. They are loaded on the client’s browser as exactly they are stored on the web server. Such web pages contain only static information. User can only read the information but can’t do any modification or interact with the information.

Static web pages are created using only HTML. Static web pages are only used when the information is no more required to be modified.

Dynamic Web page

Dynamic web page shows different information at different point of time. It is possible to change a portaion of a web page without loading the entire web page. It has been made possible using Ajax technology.

Server-side dynamic web page

It is created by using server-side scripting. There are server-side scripting parameters that determine how to assemble a new web page which also include setting up of more client-side processing.

Client-side dynamic web page

It is processed using client side scripting such as JavaScript. And then passed in to Document Object Model (DOM).

Scripting Laguages

Scripting languages are like programming languages that allow us to write programs in form of script. These scripts are interpreted not compiled and executed line by line.

Scripting language is used to create dynamic web pages.

Client-side Scripting

Client-side scripting refers to the programs that are executed on client-side. Client-side scripts contains the instruction for the browser to be executed in response to certain user’s action.

Client-side scripting programs can be embedded into HTML files or also can be kept as separate files.

Following table describes commonly used Client-Side scripting languages:

S.N.	Scripting Language Description
1.	JavaScript It is a prototype based scripting language. It inherits its naming conventions from java. All java script files are stored in file having .js extension.
2.	ActionScriptIt is an object oriented programming language used for the development of websites and software targeting Adobe flash player.
3.	Dart It is an open source web programming language developed by Google. It relies on source-to-source compiler to JavaScript.
4.	VBScript It is an open source web programming language developed by Microsoft. It is superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing class-based object oriented programming.

Server-side Scripting

Sever-side scripting acts as an interface for the client and also limit the user access the resources on web server. It can also collects the user’s characteristics in order to customize response.

Following table describes commonly used Server-Side scripting languages:

S.N.	Scripting Language Description
1.	ASP Active Server Pages (ASP)is server-side script engine to create dynamic web pages. It supports Component Object Model (COM) which enables ASP web sites to access functionality of libraries such as DLL.
2.	ActiveVFP It is similar to PHP and also used for creating dynamic web pages. It uses native Visual Foxpro language and database.
3.	ASP.net It is used to develop dynamic websites, web applications, and web services.
4.	Java Java Server Pages are used for creating dynamic web applications. The Java code is compiled into byte code and run by Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
5.	Python It supports multiple programming paradigms such as object-oriented, and functional programming. It can also be used as non-scripting language using third party tools such as Py2exe or Pyinstaller.
6.	WebDNA It is also a server-side scripting language with an embedded database system.

Web Browser

web Browser is an application software that allows us to view and explore information on the web. User can request for any web page by just entering a URL into address bar.

Web browser can show text, audio, video, animation and more. It is the responsibility of a web browser to interpret text and commands contained in the web page.

Earlier the web browsers were text-based while now a days graphical-based or voice-based web browsers are also available. Following are the most common web browser available today:

Browser	Vendor
Internet Explorer	Microsoft
Google Chrome	Google
Mozilla Firefox	Mozilla
Netscape Navigator	Netscape Communications Corp.
Opera	Opera Software
Safari	Apple
Sea Monkey	Mozilla Foundation
K-meleon	K-meleon

Architecture

There are a lot of web browser available in the market. All of them interpret and display information on the screen however their capabilities and structure varies depending upon implementation. But the most basic component that all web browser must exhibit are listed below:

Controller/Dispatcher

Interpreter

Client Programs

Controller works as a control unit in CPU. It takes input from the keyboard or mouse, interpret it and make other services to work on the basis of input it receives.

Interpreter receives the information from the controller and execute the instruction line by line. Some interpreter are mandatory while some are optional For example, HTML interpreter program is mandatory and java interpreter is optional.

Client Program describes the specific protocol that will be used to access a particular service. Following are the client programs tat are commonly used:

HTTP

SMTP

FTP

NNTP

POP

Starting Internet Explorer

Internet explorer is a web browser developed by Microsoft. It is installed by default with the windows operating system howerver, it can be downloaded and be upgraded.

To start internet explorer, follow the following steps:

Go to Start button and click Internet Explorer.

The Internet Explorer window will appear as shown in the following diagram:

Accessing Web Page

Accessing web page is very simple. Just enter the URL in the address bar as shown the following diagram:

Navigation

A web page may contain hyperlinks. When we click on these links other web page is opened. These hyperlinks can be in form of text or image. When we take the mouse over an hyperlink, pointer change its shape to hand.

Key Points

In case, you have accessed many web pages and willing to see the previous webpage then just click back button.

You can open a new web page in the same tab, or different tab or in a new window.

Saving Webpage

You can save web page to use in future. In order to save a webpage, follow the steps given below:

Click File > Save As. Save Webpage dialog box appears.

Choose the location where you want to save your webpage from save in: list box. Then choose the folder where you want to save the webpage.

Specify the file name in the File name box.

Select the type from Save as type list box.

Webpage, complete

Web Archive

Webpage HTML only

Text File

From the encoding list box, choose the character set which will be used with your webpage. By default, Western European is selected.

Click save button and the webpage is saved.

Saving Web Elements

Web elements are the pictures, links etc. In order to save these elements follow the steps given below:

Right click on the webpage element you want to save. Menu options will appear. These options may vary depending on the element you want to save.

Save Picture As: This option let you save the picture at specific location with its name. When you click this option, a dialog box is opened where you can sepcify its name and location.

Favourites

The Favourites option helps to save addresses of the webpages you visited oftenly. Hence you need not to remember long and complex address of websites you visit often.

In order to open any webpage, you just need to double click on the webpage that you have marked from bookmarks list.

Adding a web page to your Favourites

In ordered to add website to your favourite list, follow the steps given below:

Open webpage that you want to add to your favourite.

Click on favourite menu and then click on Add to Favourites opton. Addfavourites dialog box appears.

You can also click Favourites button available in the toolbar. Favourites panel will open in the left corner of the internet explorer window. Click add button, AddFavourites dialog box will apppear.

In AddFavourites dialog box, the Name: text box will contains the name of the web page that you want to add to favourites.

Click the Create in button, Favoutites folder will appear. Move to the folder where you want to store the favourites by clicking on the folder name.

Now click OK button to save the favourites.

Opening Favourites

In order to open favourites, follow the steps given below:

In the Favourite Panel, take the mouse over the site that you want to open. Now click on the address to open that site.

Favourite can also be opened from the Favourites menu by selecting the appropriate one.

Organizing Favourites

Favourites can be organized by categorizing web pages, creating folder for each category and then storing web pages into them. In order to organize favourites, follow the steps given below:

Click Favourites menu > Organize Favourites. Organize favourites dialog box will appears.

In order to organize the webpages, drag the individual webpage to the respective folder. Similarly to delete a favourite, Click on delete button.

The characteristics of the Internet that are clearly of importance in cyberlibel proceedings are:

its global nature;

interactivity;

its potential to shift the balance of power in the offline world;

accessibility;

anonymity;

its facilitation of republication;

the prominence of intermediaries;

its reliance on hyperlinks/hypertext;

its long-term impact — the use of permanent archives;

its multimedia character; and

its temporal indeterminacy.

1) Global Nature:

The first feature of the Internet is its truly global nature. Presently, more than 1.9 billion people in more than 190 countries are linked through this massive interconnected web of computer networks.^[1]

This feature immediately raises several interesting conflicts of law questions for the libel lawyer, such as:

a. In which jurisdiction did the publication of the defamation occur?

Theoretically, every time a third party accesses a defamatory posting on the Internet, publication has occurred.

b. In what jurisdiction should the plaintiff sue?

Where the plaintiff resides?
Where the defendant resides?
Wherever publication has occurred?

Defamation laws vary from country to country and in countries such as Australia, Canada, and the US, it can vary from province to province and state to state. Therefore, plaintiffs may have the luxury of “forum shopping” or choosing the jurisdiction in which the laws are most favourable.

Dow Jones and Company Inc. v. Gutnick, [2002] HCA 56, 210 CLR 575, 194 ALR 433, 77 ALJR 255

The High Court of Australia heard a defamation claim instituted by a plaintiff, who was a resident of the State of Victoria in Australia, against Dow Jones, an American corporation, for allegedly defamatory statements made in articles published by Dow Jones on its website, which was maintained on servers located in the State of New Jersey, USA. Dow Jones brought a motion to have service of the claim set aside or the action permanently stayed on the basis that the courts in Australia did not have jurisdiction. The High Court of Australia rejected that argument and allowed the action to proceed. The majority of the High Court said at para. 44:

“In defamation, the same considerations that require rejection of locating the tort by reference only to the publisher’s conduct, lead to the conclusion that, ordinarily, defamation is to be located at the place where the damage to reputation occurs. Ordinarily that will be where the material which is alleged to be defamatory is available in comprehensible form assuming, of course, that the person defamed has in that place a reputation which is thereby damaged. It is only when the material is in comprehensible form that the damage to reputation is done and it is damage to reputation which is the principal focus of defamation, not any quality of the defendant’s conduct. In the case of material on the World Wide Web (web), it is not available in comprehensible form until downloaded on to the computer of a person who has used a web browser to pull the material from the web server. It is where that person downloads the material that the damage to reputation may be done. Ordinarily then, that will be the place where the tort of defamation is committed.

c. Whose laws should apply?

For example, should the First Amendment protection and the public figure defence available in the US apply? Or should the common law of the commonwealth apply? Or the civil law?^[2]

d. Will it be possible to enforce any judgment obtained?

Currently, despite legislation allowing reciprocal enforcement of civil judgments, some courts in the US are unwilling to enforce defamation judgments from other jurisdictions because of First Amendment protection of freedom of expression.

e. What is the quantum of damages?

Theoretically, damages could be very large as a publication on the Internet potentially reaches millions of people. In practice, however, it is unlikely that millions of people will actually view each particular publication. In any event, publication on the Internet will generally be larger than in all but the largest print or broadcast media outlets.

The global nature of the Internet also raises some interesting procedural questions for the libel lawyer. In traditional libel law, there are three different types of defamatory statements:

a. A statement that is defamatory on its face and which is obviously defamatory.

b. A statement which contains false innuendo. False innuendo is a defamatory statement that has an inferential meaning, therefore only persons with the necessary contextual knowledge appreciate that the statement is defamatory. Since statements on the Internet are published globally, their inferential meanings may vary depending on the geographic or cultural location of the reader or the newsgroups or the Usenet group involved.

c. A statement of legal innuendo. While not defamatory on their face, these statements are defamatory when viewed together with extrinsic circumstances. Once again, contextual knowledge may render a statement defamatory in one jurisdiction but not in another.^[3]

The geographical indeterminancy of the technology of the Internet collides regularly with the stark reality of the geographical determinacy of defamation actions. This reality is above and beyond the conflicts of law questions that bedevil all international litigation. It is an example of a larger problem facing other areas of the law and the Internet, as stated by Binnie J. in the Supreme Court of Canada decisions of Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v. Canadian Assn. of Internet Providers, 2004 SCC 45, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 427 at para. 41:

“The issue of the proper balance in matters of copyright plays out against the much larger conundrum of trying to apply national laws to a fast-evolving technology that in essence respects no national boundaries. Thus in Citron v. Zundel (2002), 41 C.H.R.R. D/274, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal wrestled with jurisdiction over an alleged hate Web site supplied with content from Toronto but posted from a host server in California. In Reference re Earth Future Lottery, 2003 SCC 10 (CanLII), [2003] 1 S.C.R. 123, 2003 SCC 10, the issue was whether sales of tickets from an Internet lottery in Prince Edward Island constituted gambling “in the province” when almost all of the targeted on-line purchasers resided elsewhere. The “cyber libel” cases multiply. In Braintech, Inc. v. Kostiuk 1999 BCCA 169 (CanLII), (1999), 171 D.L.R. (4th) 46, the British Columbia Court of Appeal refused to enforce a Texas judgment for Internet defamation against a B.C. resident where the B.C. resident’s only connection with Texas was “passive posting on an electronic bulletin board” (para. 66). There was no proof that anyone in Texas had actually looked at it. On the other hand, in Dow Jones & Co. v. Gutnick (2002), 194 A.L.R. 433, [2002] HCA 56, the High Court of Australia accepted jurisdiction over a defamation action in respect of material uploaded onto the defendant’s server in New Jersey and downloaded by end users in the State of Victoria. The issue of global forum shopping for actions for Internet torts has scarcely been addressed. The availability of child pornography on the Internet is a matter of serious concern. E-commerce is growing. Internet liability is thus a vast field where the legal harvest is only beginning to ripen. It is with an eye to this broader context that the relatively precise questions raised by the Copyright Board must be considered. [Emphasis added].

Emphasis on reputation and freedom of speech varies greatly even within the English-speaking common law world.^[4] Jurisdictions such as the UK provide remedies for defamation but, until recently, only limited recourses for invasion of privacy,^[5] while the converse is true in other jurisdictions such as France.

The use of legal innuendos, community standards for defamatory meaning, local procedural rules, and jurisdiction arguments accentuate the geographical determinacy of defamation law. This clash has several consequences, for example:

jurisdictional disputes are a common feature of cyberlibel cases,

there are limited extraterritorial applications for injunctions against cyberlibel statements published globally (see Barrick Gold Corp. v. Lopehandia, 2004 CanLII 12938 (ON C.A.));

abuse of process motions based on limited publications in the jurisdiction are used in UK cases (see “abuse of process,” below Chapter 9, section F; Chapter 11, sections E, F, and G; and Chapter 15, section C (2)); and

a very uneven “landscape” for the liability or immunity of intermediaries. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C.A. (CDA) provides complete immunity for the Internet Service Provider (ISP). No legislative protection exists for the ISP in defamation claims in Canada.

2) Interactivity:

The interactive character of the Internet utterly changes the libel playing field. It is completely different from the Industrial Age paradigm where newspapers and television stations had dominant if not monopolistic relationships with readers and viewers.

See David Halberstam, The Powers that Be (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975)

Someone who is damaged by the press has limited remedies. In the Internet Age a person whose reputation is attacked now has a wide range of offensive and defensive remedies, including juridical, technological, and public relations options. In many cases, the scope of re-publication is as wide or can even be wider than the original publication.

The ease with which users of the Internet can access bulletin boards and Usenets and communicate with each other has engendered in its users a false sense of freedom in their communications. This is exemplified by the prevalence of activities such as “spamming”^[6] and “flaming”^[7] in Internet communications. As a result, the Internet is qualitatively different from any other medium. Consequently, Mike Godwin, counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that “the public figure defence” should apply to statements made on the Internet. The ability to reply, he claims, is much more gratifying, immediate, and potent than launching a libel action.^[8]

Some American commentators ^[9] have proposed that when a libel plaintiff has been defamed by a message posted on an electronic bulletin board and she has access to the bulletin board to post a reply, the First Amendment requires that the plaintiff prove that the defendant acted with “actual malice” in defaming the plaintiff.^[10] They argue that “Libel Plaintiffs who have been defamed by bulletin board speech and who have both access to the bulletin board on which the defamatory material appeared and a history of participation on the bulletin board are functionally equivalent to public figures.”^[11] This proposal raises numerous questions such as:

Should the conceptual basis of this defence be the First Amendment or the technological ease of reply on the Internet?

What will be the reactions of courts outside the US to a defence based on the First Amendment?

Should the elements of such a defence include: (i) access to the Internet? (ii) access to the Internet and a particular bulletin board system where the defamatory statement was published? (iii) participation in the discussion?; (iv) a previous history of participation and discussions in that particular bulletin board system?

More broadly, counsel must consider: (i) what subject matters should be covered? (ii)how to define issues of public interest on a global medium of communication?

Is this defence only available to the operators of bulletin board systems or to the original publishers as well?

What test of malice should apply? Should it be the test set out by The New York Times Sullivan (376 U.S. 254 (1964)) or the tests set out at common law?

Should this concept be a defence or simply a mitigation of damages?

These issues have not yet been decided by the courts, but they need to be addressed as the Internet does provide a unique means of a quick and responsive reply to an attack on a person’s reputation.

See criticisms of this concept in Graham J. Smith, ed., Internet Law and Regulation 4th ed. (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2007) at 345–46.

3) Shifting the Balance of Power in the Offline World ^[12]

In some situations the Internet can actually change the balance of power that exists normally in the offline world. Any enterprise that has been the target of a concerted cyber-attack comes to realize that the terms of the debate are not what it is accustomed to, where, for example it is able to gain favourable attention for its press releases. On the contrary, the attackers are the persons with the power. The ferocity, ubiquity, and tenacity of cyblerlibel attacks often stun their targets. The power of the Internet to cause instantaneous and irreparable damage was graphically described by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Barrick Gold Corp. v. Lopehandia, [2004] CanLII 12938 at paras. 44–45 (ON C.A.):

Secondly, the motions judge failed to appreciate, and in my opinion misjudged, the true extent of Mr. Lopehandia’s target audience and the nature of the potential impact of the libel in the context of the Internet. She was alive to the fact that Mr. Lopehandia “[had] the ability, through the Internet, to spread his message around the world to those who take the time to search out and read what he posts” and indeed that he had “posted messages on many, many occasions.” However, her decision not to take the defamation seriously led her to cease her analysis of the Internet factor at that point. She failed to take into account the distinctive capacity of the Internet to cause instantaneous, and irreparable, damage to the business reputation of an individual or corporation by reason of its interactive and globally all-pervasive nature and the characteristics of Internet communications outlined in paragraphs 28–33 above.

Had the motions judge taken these characteristics of the Internet more fully into account, she might well have recognized Barrick’s exposure to substantial damages to its reputation by reason of the medium through which the Lopehandia message was conveyed.

DESIGNING ECOMMERCE WEBSITE

Over the past 10 years, e-commerce has been one of the fastest growing segments of the retail industry. That may seem obvious to anyone who has ever shopped online, but the size and speed of the boom has been truly astounding. There are already hundreds of thousands of online stores around the world wide web, and according to some estimates, merchants open 20,000 new e-commerce storefronts every week.1 The popularity of the online marketplace shows no signs of slowing, so now may be the perfect time to start selling on the web. There are more options for creating an e-commerce site than ever before. You can work with an e-commerce platform provider to set up an online store, or you may want to let web professionals handle the design and development of your site from start to finish. Working with services like these offer some convenience, but if you want additional flexibility and control, your best bet may be to create your site on your own. With a little know-how and some easy-to-use tools, you can develop an e-commerce site that looks and functions exactly the way you want, helping you meet the needs of your customers and your business more effectively. In this guide, you’ll learn about what goes into creating your own do-it-yourself (DIY) e-commerce web site, from picking the right tools and services you’ll need to create your web pages, to selecting the best hosting provider and payment solution to fit your business, to figuring out the best security for your site. Choosing Your Web Design Tools After you have your business plan in place and are ready to focus on your new online venture, it’s time to start creating your e-commerce web site. The first step is selecting the tools you want to use to design and code your site. You can start from scratch and code everything by hand, but this requires solid knowledge of HTML, PHP, MySQL, and other programming languages. To shorten the learning curve, you might want to invest in web design software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web. Depending on what version you buy, these programs can run anywhere from $50 to $300. If you don’t have the budget to spend on software, there are also several free open source options to choose from, including KompoZer and BlueGriffon (formerly Nvu). While they may not offer all of the sophisticated features that paid software does, these open source programs are still powerful and easy to use. Everyone likes different web tools for different reasons, so it’s hard to say which will be the best program for you. However, there are some key elements you should look for in any software. An easy-to-use interface is important, especially if you’re less familiar with HTML and would prefer to work with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) application. WYSIWYG HTML editors allow you to design your site by clicking and dragging elements and inserting text Before You Start Creating Your Site Step 1: Create Your E-Commerce Business Plan. What are you selling? Who is your target market? How much money will you need to invest to get your e-commerce business off the ground? Do you want to incorporate or operate as a sole proprietorship? These questions may seem like no-brainers, but it’s worth taking some time to sit down and map out a strategy. Depending on the size and complexity of your business, this could take anywhere from a day or two to several months. Learn the language(s) of the web HTML, PHP, ASP, SQL, CSS, AJAX— today’s internet encompasses an alphabet soup of different programming codes and tools. While you don’t need to be an expert in any of them to create a web site on your own, you should at least familiarize yourself with these technologies. There are a wide range of resources available at your local library, bookstore, and of course online. The World Wide Web Consortium is a great place to start. GUIDE and links like you would in a word processing program. While you design your site, the WYSIWYG editor will generate the HTML code for you. Many of these editors will allow you to toggle between the visual layout and the site code, giving you flexibility to tweak the HTML to see how it affects the page layout, and vice versa. If your web site is small and simple, HTML/CSS is fine. On the other hand, if the content or structure of your e-commerce site is going to change frequently, you may want to consider an open source content management system (CMS) such as Joomla and Drupal. A CMS is software that allows users to add new web pages—or change content on existing pages— quick and easily. With a CMS in place, you won’t need to worry about coding new content in HTML because the system will do it for you. When you’re considering which web site building tools to use, you should make sure that the applications you choose support all of the functionalities that you want in your web site. For example, if you plan to use a MySQL database to power your product catalog, be sure that you can integrate it into your site using the program you decide to go with. If you’re not completely sure about the functionalities you may need, spend some time exploring web sites that you like and pay special attention to the features that appeal to you the most. Aside from product catalogs, many e-commerce sites offer newsletter registration forms, customer support widgets, and other elements that make a site more interactive. After you have a list of features you want on your site, do a little research to learn more about the technologies behind them. Selecting Your Web Host for E-commerce Now that you’ve got an idea about how you’re going to build your web site, you need to think about where to host it. There are hundreds of different web hosting providers to choose from, so how can you be sure you’re making the best decision? Even though it may seem like a daunting choice, picking the provider that’s right for you can be an easy decision if you pay attention to a few key issues. The first is price, and while it’s easy to do a quick price comparison on the web, the cheapest host you can find may not always be the best. Providers that have lower prices sometimes skimp in other areas, like customer service or technical support. You should also be on the lookout for providers that may offer low prices up front, but then run up charges with hidden fees. In addition to price, you should also consider the type of features offered by a hosting provider. Since PHP and MySQL currently play an integral role in creating dynamic, interactive e-commerce web sites, picking a host that offers compatibility with these languages should be at the top of your list. If you’re interested in having email addresses that match your domain name—an important factor when considering how you will communicate with your customers and any employees you may have—access to an email server is critical. Host-based security services, like firewalls and virus detection, are also must-haves. It’s also a good idea to check how much uptime a hosting provider guarantees. A high uptime percentage helps to ensure that your web site will be available when a visitor types your web address into a browser or finds your site via a search engine. Choosing a host that Jumpstarting Your Site Design with Free Templates Even if you decide to create a DIY web site, you don’t need to start with a blank slate. There are a wide variety of free HTML templates that you can tweak to meet your needs available at sites such as 4templates.com or freewebtemplates.com. Before you start re-coding, however, be sure that the designer really has given permission for others to use and change the look of the template. Is Free Web Hosting Right for You? It’s often said that the best things in life are free, but when it comes to web hosting, this may not be the case. If you’re running an e-commerce site, a free hosting provider may not give you the reliability or features you need to keep your customers happy. Before you decide on a host, be sure it offers the bandwidth to support all of the traffic to your site and meets your needs for guaranteed uptime. GUIDE offers frequent backups is also a safe bet just in case your site goes down and you need to recover your files. Last but not least, if you’re new to building web sites, then finding a hosting provider that offers solid customer and technical support should also be a top priority. A good hosting provider will be able to answer any questions you may have during your site launch and should be able to help you quickly address any day-to-day problems that may arise. Picking a Payment Solution After deciding where you’ll set up shop on the web, the next step is choosing a method to accept payments on your site. The payment process is what puts the “commerce” in “e-commerce.” There are two kinds of payment systems that you should consider for your site: a payment processor and a payment gateway. Payment processors, like PayPal Website Payments Standard and Google Checkout, will send a customer to a checkout page that is hosted by the processing company. After customers submit their credit card information, they will be sent back to your web site. In contrast, payment gateways—such as Authorize.net—integrate directly with your shopping cart and the transaction is essentially invisible to your customer. There are pros and cons for payment processors and payment gateways that you should weigh. For some web site owners, payment processors can be easier to use because they do not require any backend integration with web sites. When you use a payment processor, you also don’t have to worry about securing financial transactions because the processing web site will take care of it for you. However, a payment processor will also take your customers away from your site during checkout, a process that may cause confusion and may give them second thoughts about completing their transaction. Payment gateways require more technical know-how, and you will have to obtain an SSL certificate to protect credit card transactions on your site (learn more about SSL security below). Even with these additional considerations, a payment gateway will keep customers at your web site during the transaction, making the user experience smoother and more professional. Before you decide on a payment processor or gateway, you should also research the transaction, set up, and service fees that each provider charges. Average charges vary widely across the industry, with some processors charging a cash fee plus a percentage of each Don’t Forget to Register Your Domain Name Before you can host your web site anywhere, you’ll need a domain name. Pick something that your customers will find easy to remember, but try to avoid plays on words and other phrases that are not search engine-friendly. For example, if you have a business selling cat toys, CatToyOutlet.com is better than PurrfectlyPerfect Toys.com. Also, remember to complete your metadata fields with relevant content and to submit your site to the Open Directory Project , Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other popular search engines so your customers can find you. Diagram 1. E-commerce Web Site Payment Processing Flowchart Payment Processor e.g., PayPal, Google Checkout Your Shopping Cart Direct Integration Their Payment Site Payment processor’s website Payment Gateway e.g., Authorize.net Certicate Your Shopping Cart Certicate Certicate User Name: Password: GUIDE transaction (for example, PayPal charges 30 cents plus 2.9 percent of every transaction for merchants who receive $3,000 or less per month in payments). Setup fees for gateways can cost anywhere from $99 to $299, and fees typically range from 10 to 50 cents per transaction. Merchants with high sales volumes can often find providers that offer a fixed monthly rate for transactions. It is often best to start with your own bank to see what merchant solutions for credit card processing they recommend. While set up costs and fees and important, there are a few more features that you should think about before making a decision. Check to see whether the payment services provider you’re interested in offers automatic tax calculations. This will make it much easier to figure out how much sales tax you should be collecting and will cut down on accounting headaches during tax season. Also be sure to find out if the processor or gateway you want to use can automatically calculate shipping charges. With this kind of service, you’ll know exactly how much to charge your customers so shipping costs won’t eat into your bottom line. Choosing a Shopping Cart—or Creating Your Own At brick-and-mortar stores, shoppers pick items from shelves, put them in a cart or basket, and usually bring them to a cashier when they’re finished shopping. You’ll need to set up a similar system—commonly called a shopping cart solution—for your online store. Typically, shopping cart software allows people to select items from web pages, add them to their “cart,” and walk them through the purchase process when they are ready to check out. Most shopping carts will also include taxes and shipping charges to give customers a total for their order. When choosing a shopping cart to go with your payment processing solution, make sure it’s supported by your hosting provider and look to see if the cart offers the payment and shipping options you need. There are a number of open source carts with active communities like osCommerce and Zen Cart, as well as GeoTrust Partner solutions like 3dcart.com. You can also create your own shopping cart using web page authoring programs like Dreamweaver or programming it from scratch using PHP, MySQL, and other web programs and languages. SSL Security: An Absolute Must-Have for Your Site A nice site design and seamless integration with a payment system are great, but they won’t mean a thing if you and your customers aren’t protected from fraud and theft. Security is one of the biggest concerns that shoppers have when it comes to buying online. In fact, a recent survey found that 45 percent of consumers are worried about identity theft when they buy on the web.2 Even more troubling for e-commerce business owners, security concerns like these have a serious impact on consumer behavior. The National Cyber Security Alliance recently found that a majority of Americans—64 percent—have abandoned an online purchase because they were not certain that a web site was secure.3 Given these fears, SSL security is critical to your web site. With an SSL certificate, you’ll be able to prevent cybercriminals from intercepting financial data as it’s transmitted over the internet. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to show your customers that your business is legitimate and can be trusted. GUIDE What is an SSL Certificate? SSL certificates are bits of code that you install on your site that will encrypt logins, passwords, credit card numbers and other information so that hackers can’t intercept the data and decode it. After an SSL certificate is installed on a site, it uses an extensive system of security checks to establish a domain and server as trustworthy. To encrypt logins, registration forms, credit card transactions and other situations where sensitive information needs to be sent between web browsers and servers, an SSL certificate uses a private “key”—essentially a long string of complex code—that is unique to the individual server that hosts the web site and a public key that is sent to web browsers. The private key can only be “unlocked” by the public key, and vice versa, helping to ensure that the data remains secure. The vast majority of businesses obtain SSL certificates from third-party providers called Certificate Authorities (CAs). In addition to providing the SSL certificate, a CA will also authenticate a business to help ensure that the company represented by the web site actually exists. For example, GeoTrust will check domain registration information and request business registration documents to verify a web site owner’s identity and location. SSL is now considered a standard internet security technology, but that doesn’t mean that all SSL certificates and providers are the same. Just like picking your design tools and your web host, there are several important factors you should think about before you select a CA and an SSL certificate. Choosing the Right SSL Provider Before you worry about any technical specifications, finding a credible SSL provider that has a strong reputation for online security should be a top concern. Why is this so important? With SSL security from a well-known CA like GeoTrust, your visitors will know that your company has been verified by an objective third party recognized for its strong security practices. People will be more likely to buy when they know that their information is protected and your business is safe, helping you turn that 64 percent of shoppers who have abandoned an online purchase into paying customers. Without legitimate SSL security, you run the risk of losing business because customers won’t recognize that your site is safe. Even worse, it can take just one fraudulent incident to damage your business reputation, even if it wasn’t your fault. Customers may still blame you and tell everyone they know—from family, to coworkers, to a potential audience of millions on popular social media sites like Facebook, Yelp, and Twitter—that your site can’t be trusted. Along with the reputation of your SSL provider, you also need to research what type of SSL certificate will be best for your site. Fortunately, this shouldn’t take too much of your time since there are only three types of SSL certificate that you need to learn about: Extended Validation, organization validation, and domain validation. Types of SSL Certificates Domain validated SSL is a basic certificate that provides encryption and only verifies that the person applying for the certificate has the right to use a specific domain name. These certificates are ideal for business owners who want to get a certificate as quickly as possible, however, they represent the lowest level of SSL security. Organization validated SSL, on the GUIDE other hand, also confirms that a company is a confirmed legal entity and establishes a physical location for that organization, giving customers more assurance that the business is legitimate. When people click an on organization validated certificate, it will display your company name, and trust marks provided by CAs may also display your business name. GeoTrust offers a domain validated SSL product—QuickSSL Premium—as well as an organization validated certificate called True BusinessID SSL. For sites that handle financial transactions, Extended Validation (EV) is your best bet. In addition to the encryption and authentication that organization validation provides, EV SSL also offers a clear sign that your web site is safe: the address bar in high-security browsers will turn green and show the name of your company as well as the name of your SSL provider. EV SSL requires a more thorough authentication process, but many businesses experience increased conversions and higher sales thanks to the green address bar and recent research shows that top performing sites are more likely to use EV SSL.4 If you’re looking for an EV SSL certificate, GeoTrust True BusinessID with EV is an ideal choice. Conclusion and Resources E-commerce has made it possible for entrepreneurs to extend their reach farther than they could have ever imagined. You’ve just read about all of the different components that go into creating an e-commerce web site, but here’s a quick recap that will help you put everything into place: 1. Choose your web design tools — Determine what tools you’re going to use to design and your site. 2. Select your web host — Find a hosting provider that can accommodate all of the tools you want to use and offers the features you need. 3. Pick a payment solution — Weigh your options to see if a payment processor or gateway is right for you. 4. Choose or create a shopping cart — Your customers are going to need a way to select items and buy them, so find a shopping cart solution that meets your needs. 5. Obtain credible SSL security — Work with a provider like GeoTrust to get credible SSL protection for your site. With the rise of identity theft and malware, item five is particularly important. If customers don’t believe that a site is secure, they won’t choose to spend their hard-earned money there. By using a reliable SSL certificate provider, you’ll be able to arm your site against online threats and send your customers a clear message that your company can be trusted. Not all SSL certificates are equal, however. Using the information in this guide, be sure to invest in a solution from a credible provider like GeoTrust that will help you build confidence in your site, communicate your commitment to online safety, and protect your business. Taking the time to find the right SSL certificate for your site now will pay off in the future, helping to ensure that your business is a success.

Step 1: Finalize Your Model

You need to size up your requirements before starting the development process. The more precise your specifications are, the better the end product you will get. So, you need to decide first that if you wish to have a full-fledged eCommerce website to sell your products. Or you want to create an eCommerce marketplace to let others sell their merchandise on your website.

The basic difference between having your own eCommerce website and a marketplace website is the authorization. Marketplace website is a common platform, where any seller can register to sell their merchandise and anybody can purchase from them. It’s more like a market.

Whereas, an eCommerce website is a place where you sell your own products or maybe merchandise of a specific brand. Here, only the admin can add and sell products, no other seller can intervene. Similar to what you see in the retailer shops. Create your beautiful online store using an eCommerce platforms and get in the business right away.

Step 2: Choose Your eCommerce Platform Wisely

The content management system (eCommerce platform) you use to design your eCommerce website will have a huge effect on its success or failure. A CMS or eCommerce platform should be chosen while considering the scale of your website. Of course, both in terms in of products and customers.

There are various content management systems (CMS) such as WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Shopify etc. available in the market to choose from. However, you can create an eCommerce website with WordPress WooCommerce and TemplateToaster. WooCommerce is basically a WordPress plugin that converts your simple website into an eCommerce store.

But how about a beautiful amalgamation of WordPress, WooCommerce, and TemplateToaster? Yes! TemplateToaster – a website builder software that lets you create a fully functional template or website in the desired CMS. TemplateToaster can benefit you in many ways. It gives you the freedom to switch your designed theme with any other CMS of your choice. Check out free WooCommerce themes.

Step 3: Responsive eCommerce Design

The flexibility to use mobile devices has pushed the eCommerce business enormously. Thus, it is absolutely important to make sure that a website should be mobile optimized. A website should be compatible with all devices no matter what size it is of. If you don’t have a responsive web design, then there are huge chances that you might lose your maximum traffic. Also, your site will not appear in the mobile search results. Thus, your site’s SEO will be affected. Because Google itself gives preference to responsive websites.

Since much of the audiences is inclined towards mobile devices nowadays so you cannot overlook the importance of the mobile-optimized website.

Step 4: Impressive Mobile App for iOS and Android

Don’t panic it’s not a mandatory aspect of eCommerce website development. In fact, it is just a suggestion. If you want to attract more traffic to your website then you can build a mobile app targeting specifically iOS and Android users. People spend most of the time on their phones and if you are offering an exclusive app for them, then this can boost up your business giving more authentic traffic. But at times creating an app can be a little heavy on your pocket, but believe me, it’s all worth it. Additionally, having a mobile-friendly website is indeed a great idea.

Step 5: Select the eCommerce Website Hosting Platform

Your choice of hosting server can have a massive effect on your eCommerce business. The site’s performance, efficiency, and website accessibility are connected to the chosen hosting platform. You should choose a hosting plan according to the needs and after analyzing the traffic that possibly can come to your website. Although it can be tough to analyze traffic in advance still you need to have an understanding before you buy any hosting plan.

There are various types of hostings such as VPS, Dedicated hosting, Cloud hosting, Semi-dedicated hosting, etc. available that you can choose for your website.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtualized server that provides you dedicated resources on the server. It is a secure and stable solution. It can serve medium-level traffic pretty well.

Dedicated hosting is a type of hosting in which a server is allocated to a single user only. Thus, more security and high performance are guaranteed.

Cloud hosting basically operates across distinct servers in the chain. Your data in the cloud hosting renders from varied servers. The best thing about cloud hosting is that you pay for what you use only. Your server needs can fluctuate with the business up and down and so is the price which you will pay to the server.

There are some Free WordPress hosting out there but you definitely need a good paid plan for eCommerce Website Development. As they say “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”.

Step 6: Some Important Other Key Factors to Keep in Mind

Perfect Site Search

This is actually not a step to implement rather a key component that needs to be taken care of in the development cycle. It helps you increase the user engagement to your website. The perfect the site search result, the more the user engagement will. Yes! A site search will help users to search for the desired product on a particular website. A site search engine searches the website for a particular result. When a user can’t find what they are looking for then chances of increase in bounce rate gets higher. You ought to have a perfectly working site search to keep your users on your site and to scale your WordPress eCommerce website easily.

Adding Related Items

It is absolutely important that other displayed merchandise should be related to the product that a visitor is currently viewing. Display of unrelated items can cause you to lose potential customers. Likewise, in the multi-product website, you need to be very specific about the related items you are showing to the potential customer. For example, you can display a specific model covers to the visitor that is searching for a mobile phone.

Perfect Categorization and Tag usage

A perfectly categorized website is a treat to eyes and the easy navigation is like a cherry on the cake. If all the products are well categorized then users can quickly find the relevant items. Thus, increase traffic to your website. Whereas, for a multi-product website it becomes even important to have well-defined categories to display the products.

You can also use tags to link to your merchandise. Since a Tag is a keyword referring to a particular product and helps it appear in the search result. Once a product is tagged then it is easy for a user to discover that specific product simply by typing that tag in the search. Therefore, tags are another very helpful tool to organize your store.

Look after SEO

One thing that you can never overlook in the eCommerce website development is search engine optimization. Use the best SEO practices to help people find your website, products, and services. An SEO-friendly website draws more customers than a non-optimized website. Similarly, adding target keywords make it easily searchable for the users. During the website development life cycle, you’ll find many SEO strategies that if implemented correctly can attract a huge number of potential customers to your website. Follow these eCommerce SEO tips for higher sales and conversions.

Use eCommerce Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are basically a piece of structured data that helps users as well as crawlers to perceive more information about the site’s content. These rich snippets work amazingly different for your website. They attract the audience by displaying necessary information because you can’t tell a search engine to what exactly to show regarding your merchandise or pages. eCommerce rich snippet gives an idea to the search engine and customer to what to expect from a specific page. And it will help your site gain more exposure in organic search.

Security

Being an eCommerce website, security is the biggest concern. The transactions carried out through your website is your responsibility and it needs to be as secure as possible. The server you are using should Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliant. And your site must support Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). As the primary purpose of SSL is to provide a secure connection to exchange sensitive information such as credit card details, name, phone number, address etc. over the internet. Thus, employing SSL will give your customers a sense of security and consequently keep your data absolutely secure. In fact, basic SSL certificates are freely available these days. You can follow these instructions to set up SSL using Let’s Encrypt.

Speed optimization

The site’s performance is directly proportional to its speed. If the speed is slow, you’re likely to lose customers. It’s true! Generally, people abandon the website which takes more than 4 to 5 seconds to load. So, you have less than 5 seconds only to hook a new visitor to your website. Page load can significantly impact the user experience and your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers. There are many ways to improve the performance of your WordPress website to run it smoothly. Consider using image compression and caching during development. Caching is a technique to save a static copy of pages so the server does not need to generate it dynamically every time it is requested. Caching is an essential tool for ensuring that your website runs efficiently and provides the best experience to the users.

Step 7: Website Testing

Once you’re ready with eCommerce website or even along with the designing process you can run testing. It is probably the most vital facet in website development. Testing is carried out for:

Bugs

User Convenience

Broken links

Usability

Shopping Cart Abandonment

Forms

Script

Navigation

spell-check

Both automated and manual testing should be done so that there should be no room for errors. However, you can never test enough. eCommerce website having errors or any other type of bug can leave your visitors as well as existing users dissatisfied.

So here are some factors which you need to keep your focus on. And you require to run various testings such as cross-browser compatibility checks, resolution testing, load test, scalability, stress testing, integration testing, performance examination, security checking, functionality check, cookies usage, and database testing.

According to experts opinion, around 20 to 25% of total ecommerce website development time should be invested in this stage only.

Step 8: Market Your eCommerce Website

That’s it. Congratulations, your store is now live. But don’t forget to market your website. Digital marketing is actually the most essential part of the eCommerce website development life cycle. Rarely will visitors discover your eCommerce website by accident. Thus, in order to generate sales, you will actively need to market your website on various platforms. In fact, you should be ready in advance with your market plans, so that as soon as you launch your website, online marketing and promotions can be rolled out. An online market campaign needs to be really effective so that the website doesn’t go unnoticed. Right strategy, right implementation at the right time will definitely attract potential users.

To promote your product and to increase traffic and drive sales, follow these popular marketing methods.

It Includes:

First and the foremost method is the traditional method is by giving ads in the newspaper, magazines, pamphlets, etc.

Social media marketing (SMM). SMM is the most popular and attention seeking digital marketing solution that helps marketers to market their merchandise conveniently. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest, etc. have almost become an integral part of every business marketing strategy to promote their business.

Email marketing is another effective way to market your website. You can ask your visitors to leave their email addresses in exchange for some enticing offers or promos. Send emails to your customers at specified intervals (not too often) and inform them about the new deals or new launches. Send them discount coupons to keep their interest in your store.

Content can help you reach the next level. Yes! Content marketing is an imperative measure of eCommerce development. It is something that can take the website higher in search results. Produce authentic, unique, and shareable information to attract visitors to your store. Give them something interesting and genuine to read and keep up their engagement.

Use viral marketing. Viral marketing is all about how creatively and quickly you create a strategy to get people to promote your website via however medium they like.

Step 9: Payment Methods

This is certainly a significant aspect of eCommerce business. It is your responsibility to make sure that no customer should ever feel insecure while making online payments. Thus, it is essential to include convenient payment options like cash on delivery, net banking, payment wallets, and credit or debit card payments. The best user experience always includes simple and secure payment methods. Support for these payment options will ensure credibility. If you wish to serve customers from various countries, then it requires you to integrate multiple currency payment options to ease your foreign customers. Here I would like to mention how the “Cash on Delivery” method dramatically changed the eCommerce ecosystem in India

Step 10: Effective Return and Exchange Policy

Since you’re running an eCommerce website so the chances that you will face many cases return and exchange of items. Nowadays with huge competition in the market, you have to have a good exchange and return policy to stay in business and ahead in this race. You should employ easy exchange and return policies so that your customers will never have trouble if they ever want to change or replace or maybe return the product. Give your users extra peace of mind.

Step 11: Offers, Sales, and Coupons

This is interesting. Well, at least for the customers. Everyone likes offers, sales, and coupons, you being the owner of an eCommerce website need to keep this in mind to introduce various offers and sales time to time and keep up the excitement. And also if you get lucky enough to collect plenty of email addresses of your valuable customers then you can send them discount coupons via email as well. Not only existing customers but sales and offers can get you more organic visitors as well. So keep tracing customer’s browsing habits, purchase patterns, and other user reactions to refine your offerings accordingly.

TRECHNOLOGIES REQUIRED TO BUILD AN ECOMMERCE WEBSITE

Over the last many years, ecommerce has changed how people buy and sell online. The Internet offers a quick and easy way for people to buy things without having to visit a real store. An online store can reach customers anywhere in the world. Online businesses are rapidly developing an ecommerce website to face times of economic adversity by offering greater discounts, flat-rate delivery, loyalty programs, and other incentives. There are many popular ecommerce platforms that make it easy to run promotions and keep your customers happy. Finally, although the boom in online sales has also opened a potential avenue for fraud and scams, site-builders have managed to stay ahead by offering top-of-the-line site protection and payment security to keep the online marketplace as safe as possible.

Building a successful ecommerce site has become one of the most popular business trends. It may seem like a herculean task to set up an online business (not underestimating it either) or the actual e-commerce website development, but in real it isn’t that big of a hurdle as you’ve probably been hearing from most of the folks out there.

THE HARDWARE

Computer

Most current computers and laptops have high enough specifications to be used to create a website. The most important specification to check on the computer would be the size of the RAM, which should be over 2GB, though more is better. This will ensure that the computer runs quickly and smoothly, even with heavier programs such as website editors or photo editors. The computer should have a keyboard and mouse attached and working as well.

Internet

In order to create a website, access to a high-speed Internet connection can be vital. This allows you to transfer the files that will make up your website to the online server that will be hosting your website, post updates on your website and look at your website live online to make sure that it is displaying correctly.

External Hard Drive or DVDs for Backup

You should always keep a fairly current backup of your website in case there is an issue where the site crashes or files become corrupted. You can keep this backup on an external hard drive or a set of DVDs, depending on your preference. It is possible for an external hard drive to crash, losing your backup, but DVDs can be more unwieldy and can also scratch causing data loss. How often you should create a backup depends on how often you update your website, but once a month for a regularly-updated site can be a good amount of time.

Camera

Unless your website is going to consist only of text, you will want to have a way to get some digital photos and videos for your website. While you can buy stock photos and videos, these can end up being expensive if you need many of them, and they may not be as specific as the shots you need. A digital camera with video capability will allow you to take photos and videos that can be downloaded to your computer and added to your website. Because you took the photos and shot the videos yourself, you don't need to worry about copyright infringement of other people's media.

Server

You will need a server computer to host your website on to make sure that it is available all the time for anyone trying to access it. While you can set up a computer to act as a web server, this is a highly complicated task, and it is far easier, more reliable and cost-effective to simply purchase a hosting package from a web hosting company. They will keep and maintain the server computer, and you will be able to access it to change files on your website.

Mobile Devices

While not necessary, many free website creation softwares allow users to adjust, update and work on their website from a mobile device. If you are on the go often and would like to be able to make adjustments to your site from wherever you are at, you may want to look into getting a web-enabled smartphone or device.

THE SOFTWARE

Doing online business means trades of goods from your Webstore to the customer, and trade means transactions. The idea of creating an online store raises few questions in everyone’s mind like ‘how’ and ‘who’ can build my e-commerce store? On what platforms can my ecommerce store be built? How can I find products to sell on my online store and how the transactions will be handled?

Like all business requires proper planning, discussion, backup plans, contingency plan, similarly before building any e-commerce store, you need proper planning about everything. Before starting, you need to think and list down all the possible aspects repercussions regarding online business.

Write your e-business plans. The e-commerce plans start with website goals. Who will be your targeted audience? What kind of products and services you want to offer. How much time and money you need to make your online presence. How will you handle shipping and payments?

Although there are many ecommerce and website hosting platforms, you must choose a perfect platform where your ecommerce store can be built.

It all seems difficult at first, but with every step, you will grasp things easily. A lot of the things which didn’t make sense at first would probably start resonating with time. Here’s a rundown of everything which requires opening an e-commerce store. Let’s get down to business:

The Process of E-commerce Website Development- Let’s Get Started!

There are many ecommerce tools and technologies required to build an e-commerce store and operate a successful online business. Both software and hardware technologies must be included in your e-business plan.

Web Server

A web server is used to host an e-commerce website. All the Html, JavaScript, PHP files, databases, media files that make up the entire website are stored on this server. The web server runs on Windows or Linux operating system. Managing a web server is a very specific job. The website development companies host the site on their own web server or pay a hosting company to provide space on a secure web server.

Server Software

When a user visits any website on a web browser, the web server knows the client is requesting some specific information. So it processes that request and serves the correct files to the client. The web browser then displays these files to the user.

There are many types of server software available including application software, database server, file server software, and cloud computing software. The popular web server software includes Apache and Windows IIS. Server software can either use on a physical server or on a virtual / cloud server.

Web Tools

A web authoring tool is used to create the front end of an e-commerce website. They range from basic HTML text editors (like Notepad++) to more complex graphic authoring tools and CMS (content management system) with built-in frameworks and debugging tools.

Html files are created by Dreamweaver along with the CSS (cascading style sheet) which enhance the visual appearance of the site. Another web authoring tool would be Visual Studio .net that can be used to make the sites which have integrated databases in it. Graphic design packages are also web authoring tools which design the skin for a user interface.

Database System

A database is an integral part of an e-commerce website. The database is used to store information about the products and services of the website such as pricing, description, image, details, and sales. In addition to this, the customer details are also stored in the database like what they ordered, their payment details, shipping details, and contact information.

It is necessary to program the website to connect securely to the database so that all the orders are processed correctly and your business runs smoothly. Technologies like PHP and MySQL are the communication route between the website and the DBMS (database management system).

Networking

TCP (transfer control protocol) and IP (internet protocol) defines as how computers should connect with each other through the internet and how they share information. Common TCP/IP protocols are HTTPS, HTTP, and FTP. We use these protocols to access the website without even realizing it. FTP (file transfer protocol) used to download files from a browser.

HTTPS (where the “S” stands for security) responsible for the secure communication between a server and a browser like an account information or personal information.

For an e-commerce website or online store, it is considered essential to provide a secure connection. SSL (secure sockets layer) and TLS (transport layer security) are the protocols associated with trust and security of any e-commerce website.

Browser Compatibility

A web browser is a software application that is used to locate, receive and display content received from the web servers. Popular web browsers include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. Web developers and Web development agencies test the website see how it displays on multiple browsers across multiple devices and screen sizes before launching the website.

The Tip: To analyze website traffics, use tools like Google Analytics to get an idea as what browsers people are using and which one is the most popular.

Ports

Ports allow one device to connect with the other through a different and unique IP address. A device can have more than one port.

Port 25 (SMTP) is usually reserved for email. It is used to transmit data from remote email servers. If that port is blocked no emails can be sent. Some other common port numbers are 80(HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), 21 (FTP), 22 (SSH). Firewalls can often block a port to tighten the security.

Domain Names

Domain names link to a company or a brand. Successful e-commerce companies have recognizable domain names. If you have any smaller business then it is best to select the domain name as per your business name. This would help to rank highly in search engines.

If a business becomes successful online, it is important to protect the brand by doing multiple registrations of domain names such as .com, .net, .uk, .org, .co

Doing this ensures that no one can steal your business by copying your business model.

Here is a quick recap that will help you put everything into place.

1: Front End: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, JQuery
2: Server Side Scripting: PHP, ASP
3: CMS: WordPress + Woo commerce, Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop
4: Database: MySQL, MSSQL

What is business development for ecommerce?

Business development is a relatively vague term with a purpose and responsibility that differs from company to company. While the definition has been infinitely discussed, the ultimate objective of business development is to find strategic opportunities that create long-term value.

Web Technologies for E-Commerce Web Development

Websites and apps have become crucial for businesses and organizations to showcase their services, goods, and brands. To this end, you need a website that is well designed with feature-rich apps. Modern ecommerce web technologies have acquired a status where it’s not mandatory for businesses to develop e-commerce websites or apps right from scratch.

Here are the ten latest web technologies for e-commerce web development that will help you make a practical decision.

Magento

Shopify

WooCommerce

BigCommerce

OpenCart

Drupal Commerce

Volusion

OsCommerce

SimpleCart

Squarespace

Magento

Till date, Magento is the most famous and reliable e-commerce platform when it comes to B2B & B2C customers. Magento is a powerful SEO friendly platform with multiple features that can be readily customized. Magento’s ability to integrate with third-party products & services makes it a favorite among the customer community.

Shopify

For an e-commerce website, Shopify is a very popular SEO compliant and constantly evolving web technology. Besides an impressive professionally designed template for your storefront, there are several add-ons with responsive checkout being one of them. Another excellent feature is that Bitcoins can be used by your customers to make payments.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is undoubtedly an amazing choice for problem-free setups. It is a free e-commerce plugin that can integrate with WordPress enabling store owners to sell their products rapidly and easily. It is estimated that around 30 percent of online store owners rely on WooCommerce plugin not only to sell their products but also to ship them and collect payments.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is quite popular because it has several new features and functions like built-in blogging, improved SEO and customer support round the clock. Its primary benefits are a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive knowledge base.

OpenCart

OpenCart is a practical and easy open source CMS endorsed by outstanding developers for e-commerce. Its features include several simple back-end plug-ins. You can edit CSS within the admin. But OpenCart’s support system is not very detailed compared to other systems.

Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce is an exceptional online content marketing platform for open-source content. It guarantees an excellent customer experience using the e-commerce website. It can easily incorporate SEO strategy and blog integration as it can integrate seamlessly with the Drupal CMS framework.

Volusion

Volusion is commonly used owing to several features, one of which is an easy-to-use interface. Although Volusion’s add-on shop is not as big as Shopify and a blog setup is not available, but account experts provide you with personalized services. Opposed to a responsive layout, the mobile site is used by Volusion stores.

OsCommerce

OsCommerce is one of the first open source systems available with a big support database and an active forum. Its prominence is due to its easy installation and user-friendly interface. Although some consumers consider OsCommerce’s design and software update to be a little outdated store owner have complete control over their store and database.

SimpleCart

SimpleCart is best suited to small online stores ‘ needs. It operates on HTML having a small footprint but supporting multiple currencies.

Squarespace

Squarespace enables you to design attractive websites with images and rich templates. With Squarespace, customers have complete control over inventories, product variants, coupon generation, and shipping setup. Squarespace inculcates all the essential tools to create a universal e-commerce store.

Ecommerce Technology Trends for 2019

Regardless of the maturity of your ecommerce presence, you need to keep looking ahead to guarantee future success. To raise your ecommerce efforts in 2019, you should benefit from these three evolving trends.

1. Sell your goods on social media

Effective marketing is about enhancing your messaging to appeal to your target audience, but messaging won’t matter if the audience never sees it. It’s important to meet your audience members where they spend most of their time. In other words, if your customer base is online, it’s on social media one-third of that time. Therefore, you’re missing a great opportunity if you are not selling on social media.

2. Remix the buyer’s reality

Although diverse reality technologies have yet to see conventional adoption, they have made huge efforts to that end. Just as the internet, augmented reality and virtual reality will be a total game changer for retail. While augmented reality might not be everywhere yet, ecommerce retailers that effectively integrate AR capabilities into the shopping experience tend to gain a substantial advantage over their competitors.

3. Increase Personalization and Customer Engagement

Compared to conventional retail shopping, ecommerce stores have virtually no personal interaction. Online stores have no personnel who can endorse products based on your interests, sensitivities, and predilections. To imitate this experience, ecommerce businesses influence personalization opportunities through the shopping drive. Just as online course providers are substituting the need for in-person teaching, ecommerce is swapping the need for in-store retail experiences.

Conclusion

There are multiple e-commerce tools and technologies. It’s always good to know what resources are actually required to build an ecommerce store from start-to-finish. Professional ecommerce website design process is a documented outline of the steps needed to be taken from start to finish, which divides and categorizes the work and then breaks these high-level sections into tasks and resources. But once you have gone through the complete guide to the technologies needed for building an e-commerce site, things will become easier and systematic and will make your ecommerce development process smooth and fluid. While there’s been a lot of work on the growth and development of ecommerce, there are aspects of the technology that needs to be unearthed.

Do E-commerce Merchants and Online Stores Need In-House IT departments?

Hiring an in-house IT team takes a lot of time and money. And if your business is fairly new and is yet to reach Amazon’s or Walmart’s level of success, you can start by outsourcing the IT part.

Just imagine, you would have to advertise the vacancy, read through all the applications, conduct interviews, consult with your colleagues, hire people, train them… Also, there’s always the risk, that a newly put together team won’t work smoothly right away. Moreover, there will be a lot of turmoil with the salary, benefits, taxes, etc. And what do you do with all these people, when your e-commerce website is up and running, and only needs maintenance every now and then? You probably wouldn’t want to go through the trouble of letting all those people go. Not to mention how inconvenient this way is if you are planning one or two other projects in the distant future.

Outsourcing E-commerce Website Development: Yes or No?

It looks like we made our point. Outsourcing e-commerce website development does actually seem to be a good idea. Especially, if Qubit Labs provides you with a team of top-notch e-commerce website developers, and takes care of all the managerial issues for you. For example, the most common outsource tasks for e-commerce merchants and online store owners are:

Web Design

Search Engine Optimization

Content Writing

Accounting

Customer Service

Data Entry

Software Development

Quality Assurance

Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to outsource some other web development aspects too..

Be aware, though. There are still some risks when outsourcing e-commerce website development. Because of time-zone or cultural differences, communication issues may arise. Or you may find it difficult to supervise the team’s work. But don’t worry. We know how to avoid and overcome these obstacles and to start a smoothly running partnership with an outsourcing team. And we are ready to start one with you.

Outsourcing Website Development Is Indeed Easy

Of course, it is only up to you to decide, whether outsourcing e-commerce website development is a good idea for your business right now. Your final word depends on your business’ current needs and finances. But of you are still in doubt, remember: outsourcing website development is not as difficult, as you may think!

Risks: In-House vs. Outsourcing

On both sides of the fence, you’ve got some basic risks. First, if you’re not a tech pro, there’s a risk in trusting folks who claim to be pros. Then you’ve got the risk of hiring viable talent, managing employees, and employee turnover. Most importantly, there’s the risk of the overall success of your product. As with most things in business, there are advantages and disadvantages to both options.

Let’s take a look at the main risks associated with in-house developers first.

Risks With Hiring In-House Developers

When you employ a group of in-house developers, you acquire all of the risk in terms of their abilities. So the most obvious question is…

…do you even know how to hire tech talent?

That’s pretty much a prerequisite to hiring in-house. If you don’t, you will need help from someone who does or you’ll be taking a huge risk in that you’ll recognize the right talent when you see it.

Do you know what skill sets are needed?

Having access to a pool of pros, with current and evolving skill sets, will undoubtedly help your company thrive. But what skill sets are required to build the product and manage it to completion and execute after launch? How many resources are needed to develop native apps or engineer relevant software? Which alternatives will deliver the skill sets to provide the level of services you will need — both now and in the future?

During the 1990’s, plenty of forward-thinking companies managed to stay fairly relevant by staffing one or two IT professionals. And when those guys weren’t playing Minesweeper, they were successfully staying ahead of the tech curve. Today, it takes an IT village to raise up an online and mobile success that meets the needs of the masses.

The typical resources required, to develop a successful app business include:

· iOS developer

· Android developer

· Back-end developer (server-side)

· Interactive designer

· Front-end (web) developer

· Project manager

· Product manager (this could be you, could be someone else on your team)

· Business analyst (you’re building a business here, not just an app)

· App store optimization (ASO) expert

· App marketing expert (could also be an ASO expert)

· and quite possibly a data scientist

Unless you’re picking from the clearance aisle, these folks ain’t cheap. You might think there’s no way you’ll need all of these people but we’ve rarely seen (less than 1%) a successful app business without all of these disciplines involved.

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Assuming you’ve got some candidates, you’ll be responsible for training, planning, ongoing product evaluation, feedback loops, re-development — everything. And, as you might guess, managing a team of tech gurus isn’t the easiest task — particularly if you’re not proficient in the IT field.

Turnover is another risk you can’t ignore.

According to PayScale, the tech field has the lowest average tenure rate of any other field. When using in-house talent, be aware that another tech company may come calling — and one of your, previously loyal, app developers might jump ship. With an in-house IT operation, you accept the likely risk of attrition. Onboarding another tech genius can put your entire project on hold — threatening the viability of a live product.

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As for the overall success of the product, the risk does fall entirely on you and of course the team you hire — assuming you hired the right team.

Risks with Outsourcing your Development

When choosing to hire an outside development firm your main risks include:

· the firm going out of business

· not being able to deliver the right product

· they take your money and disappear

· it ends up costing you way more than anticipated

In other words…

…your risk is in hiring the right firm, with the right people, with the right process.

Therefor, you have to know what you’re looking for and what questions to ask to ensure you hire the right firm.

· Is it a start-up dev shop?

· Does the firm have grievous complaints with the Better Business Bureau or horrible Yelp! reviews?

· Was the group unable or unwilling to provide you with a recent portfolio?

· Have they built similar apps or similar components to yours?

· How is the quality of their work?

· Will they help you build the business or just the product?

· Did they only provide you with a one-page bid?

If you’re considering a tech firm, and you don’t get the right answer to any of these questions, there’s a plausible risk that ‘Shady Eddie’s App Developers’ may not be in business very long.

When it comes to outsourcing software development, app creation, or web development — choose an established firm, that has a top-notch reputation and understands the business of software. Then you won’t be stuck, trying to breathe life into a partially complete software project, when a fly-by-night tech firm fails to deliver.

Advantages: in-house vs outsourcing

We’ve scared you with risks but what about the advantages? Surely there are distinct advantages to each option. Yes, you are correct. Let’s review them…

Advantages to an In-House Team

Once you’ve established your in-house crew, you’ve got them in the palm of your hand. You’re the boss. However laborsome it may be to attain, develop, and manage IT talent, having some seasoned pros in your home court, is one sizable advantage to an in-house operation.

This means you have a greater ability to create a culture around your product and your business. A team that is only focused on one product, one mission, all in alignment toward a common goal.

Although a good development firm will keep you continuously involved in the process, when your team in in-house, you have full ownership and control over every aspect of the product as well as the knowledge gained while developing it. So you are aware of every detail, every bit of progress made, and every set back along the way. You don’t have to trust that delivery dates will be hit as you will know if your team will make them or miss them. This generally gives you greater visibility into the progress.

Advantages to Outsourcing your development

The most coveted advantage to outsourcing software development is, by far, the availability and scalability of the powerhouse skills concentrated in a proven tech development firm. The skills that can provide business acumen, data science, design, programming, and ongoing enhancements of the product and business, represent the immense value of outsourcing an experienced third party and trusting them to nurture your baby.

With an outside firm, you’re not carrying the skill risk.

A proven tech firm will have more than enough talent to understand and execute your project well. And the experts on staff will be available to you, as needed. It isn’t a question of “Who do I hire to help my company progress into the IoT market?” Instead, you reach out to the tech firm, and it will put the right person on the job. You pay the firm to do the heavy lifting and to take on the resource risks.

Provided you’re with a solid tech firm, the risk of your overall product delivery is minimal. A proven development company will assume the risk of the development and production of your project. They’ll keep you at the helm from pre-planning to launch. Then, they’ll make ongoing resources available to ensure your redevelopment needs are covered.

Turnover of employees is also a risk you won’t absorb. In the event of turnover, a good tech development firm will keep you informed of its intentions and work quickly to make things right. But a great tech development firm will have redundancies in place to ensure there is no hiccup in the production, development, or retooling of your project. If you’re working with the right outsourcing group, turnover and employee development is rarely something you’ll have to consider.

Successful apps take much more than good software development.

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An app development company, that’s worth its weight, will understand that and have the process and skills necessary and work to ensure the long-term sustainability of your product.

Cost: In-House vs. Outsourcing

A steep bottom line exists on both sides of the scale. How much will it really cost for your company to hire a firm to develop your software or app vs. in-house IT staffers for the project? How much, in total, should you expect to shell out for quality web development or the creation of your first native app? What are the true costs of hiring in-house?

Let’s find out…

The Cost of Hiring In-House Developers

A good developer is well worth his or her salary. But, as we’ve covered, you’ll need more than just one good worker. Hopefully, with a few posts on craigslist, you’ll find all of the necessary talent to handle the resource needs of your company. Then take a look at the chart below to review average annual salaries of the IT professionals you’ll need for quality web development (2016 average salaries, courtesy of glassdoor.com).

Average Tech SalariesTitleSalaryiOS Developer$85,000Android Developer$84,562Back-End Developer$116,808Designer$67,281Project Manager$91,440Data Scientist$91,440

When you add up the average salaries, for each player on the team, you’re looking at more than $500,000 per year. It’s true that some groups may be able get by with a bare-bones operation (no designer, the project manager is your mom, and you skip the data scientist). If you bypass the sparkle and settle for a minor-league app development crew, it’ll put you in the ballpark of around $300,000 per year for salaries alone. Neither equation takes into account equipment, personnel management, licensure, or office space — that’ll be another chunk of change.

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Just looking for employees of this caliber isn’t always cheap. If you don’t find the right people on the free job sites, expect to pay one of the larger, more well known, employment sites to post job ads. Or, take the traditional route, and hire an IT recruiter. Add in a signing bonus, monthly health insurance, dental insurance, paid holidays and sick days, worker’s comp insurance, payroll taxes, continuing education and training. Hiring a talented, in-house tech operation is costly. And it isn’t finite.

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Once you’ve hired and groomed the IT Dream Team, it may be troublesome to scale-down your workforce, when your needs aren’t as intense as they were during launch week. IT pros are people too — not just software developers. They have families to feed and they generally aren’t looking for temporary work. By staffing in-house developers, you’re electing to incur all of the overhead all of the time, with no guarantee of product success.

The Cost of Outsourcing Your Development

Trusting a tech firm and signing on the dotted line can raise the blood pressure, for sure. Outsourcing may be a lot less expensive than owning an IT department, but it it’s still a huge investment. And if you hired the wrong firm in the past and have been taken for a ride by an IT group who has promised big and come up short, you may have a bad taste in your mouth.

While there are many poorly run dev shops out there, the reality is a good solid firm will be worth every penny you spend with them. You will get years of knowledge and expertise that you simply won’t have and can’t afford to bring in-house in the early stages of your company.

But what will it cost to hire a development firm?

A typical development firm will charge an hourly rate for the hours they estimate it to take their resources to build your product. They may have a couple different rates for different disciplines or skill levels depending on their model. They will add these numbers together, apply a buffer, and come out with a cost. Typical app development agency rates range from $100 — $250 per hour.

App costs vary greatly depending on the size of the development firm and, of course, the complexity of your project.

· Large firms: $250,000 — $1,000,000+

· Medium firms: $150,000 — $450,000

· Small firms: $50,000 — $150,000

According to the report by Kinvey, on average, organizations spend around $270k to develop an app.

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Final Considerations

There are plenty of companies that really don’t need to outsource their technology needs. They can cash-flow an in-house IT department with ease and they have enough expertise and technology related work to justify paying an IT crew, annually.

For other companies, there may not be a need to hire, train, develop and, direct an in-house, IT department. For those businesses, and in particular, startups, a reliable and experienced third party is an undeniable asset. Businesses who want to swim with the big fish in the evolving rapids of technological change have to find solutions that fit their budgets and their true business needs.

If you’re a startup, it may make a ton of sense to hire and leverage the collective expertise of an outside firm to get your business on the right path and to allow you to focus on other areas of the business. Then, as you grow, you slowly hire in-house talent and take your development in-house.

At the end of the day, you’re developing a business not just an app. Keep reminding yourself of that. In the early stages you should make every effort to minimize your risks while maximizing your opportunity. If this means hiring an experienced, business-minded firm then find the best one you can afford. If this means recruiting and hiring an in-house team, then make sure you know how to hire the right people, make sure you know your costs, and follow that path. Weigh your risks and make an educated decision that’s right for your new business.

Hacking;-
Hacking is gaining access to unauthorised systems and resources. This allows the hacker to change details on the website and enable it to sound as if the website owner had done this. When a website has been hacked, the e-commerce will be forced to shut down the website until the details have been changed and security updated. This will then affect their customers as this will then prevent them from using the website in which could cause inconvenience for example, checking flight times. If this was to happen often, customers will then begin to give up on the website and take their searches elsewhere leaving the e-commerce with a loss of customers and therefore losing money. If this was to happen, this would then begin to affect the e-commerce supplier as they will no longer use the website for their searches and therefore promotion would become a waste of money and so they will eventually run out of business being forced to shut down. For good this time. In order to prevent this, the website should keep their security updated at all times and possibly change their access password often to avoid any knowledge of the password getting out and keep the amount of people that know this as low as possible.

Viruses;-
Viruses are a software that is designed to specifically damage a computer. Spreading from program to program and software to software. If a virus has been planted into a website this will cause some problems and complaints from their customers as whenever they enter the website, the virus will then hop onto their computer causing damage to the computer. Once this happens the customers will then complain and will then refuse to use the website again and warn off other potential customers. The e-commerce will then begin to lose customers and then money. Without money the e-commerce can then no longer advertise and so will eventually be forgotten and then out of business. In order to prevent this, the e-commerce website should be sure to download an anti-virus program in order to protect their customers and their business.

Identity Theft;-
Identity theft is when a person gets hold of another person’s details and use them as their own to do what they want, claiming to be that person. On websites such as banking websites this can be a potential problem if not kept secure enough. If a customer’s identity is stolen, the thief could then use their bank details to claim their money or use it to buy what they want and claim to be that person and so claim the money as theirs. If this was to happen the customer would be forced to shut down their bank completely when realised and will most likely decide to change banking companies and this will then reflect badly on the e-commerce reputation. This could then lead to the bank company getting in a lot of trouble for the lack of security breach placed on their website, causing extra stress and devastation among their customers. They may then be forced to close the website down whilst they update security which will then cause inconvenience and the company will then gain a very bad reputation and new users will then choose other companies and depending on the circumstances some existing customers could switch. To prevent this from happening, the website should be sure to update their security, changing security questions and passwords often.

Firewall;-
A firewall can be hardware and software. It is a security system that controls what goes in and out of a system. It is designed to stop any unauthorised access from using a private network. Firewall is necessary because it can help to prevent any unwanted internet users from using the private networks which are connected to the internet. Firewalls can slow down the server speed as firewalls are designed to check for any potential danger and decide whether it is safe or not before giving you access to the page. Due to the fact that firewalls can slow down your server this can then slow down an e-commerce website meaning that it may take a little extra time for your customers to gain access to the page. This could go in two directions. The customer could be impatient and decide not to use the website because of the speed to gain access to it or could gain more customer trust, putting their mind at rest that they are safe from any potential danger. Firewalls will keep the website safe and secure meaning that e-commerce supplier can relax a little bit knowing their website is safe and therefore their customers are safe.

Strong Passwords;-
Strong passwords are essential to a website. Keeping strong passwords can prevent hacking. A strong password will consist of random words that have no relation to you or anyone else and including lots of random numbers which will be impossible to just guess. When you have a customer signing up to your website, you should be sure to ensure they have strong passwords before access. This will help to prevent them from hacking and identity theft meaning the customer can then roam the website safe and secure. Not only customers but for the e-commerce supplier themselves as this will keep hackers out of their websites where they can then then prevent viruses and identity theft and vandalism on their website meaning both them and their customers are safe.

Alternative;-

A basic authentication method is when you try to hit a url for a web application that is protected and you are unauthorised, there will be a window which pops up which will request your username and password which is then sent to the website to check up on as to whether it is correct or not. If the password and username match you will then be authorised and have access and if not then you will be denied access.

Examples of alternative methods are;

Face Recognition : Face recognition would allow the computer to scan your face and remember it so that only you can access the website or computer as it only recognises your face and no body else’s.

Fingerprint : Everybody’s fingerprints are different. Using a finger scanner will allow only the selected people with their installed finger prints access. It will scan your finger every time you want access.

Eyries Recognition : Using eyries recognition is also another safe bet as it goes by your eyes. This means that only you with your eyes can access the computer or website.

These methods are the most safe, but also the hardest. You have to make sure to be exact when using these other options. For face recognition you have to be sure to keep the same emotion of your face when logging in. For the fingerprint, you must keep your finger in the same angle and also the same finger. You cannot change the finger every time. Finally eyries recognition. When you are wearing glasses or contacts these can interfere with the machine so you must be sure to keep them the same. Try not to change contacts.

SSL;-
SSL is short for Security Socket Layer. It is a type of protocol that is used to transmit private documents using the internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system in which uses two keys to encrypt data; a private key and a public key. There are layers on a server that SSL has to go through before reaching the requested data. The first layer is the outer layer. This is where the high level protocols make bay such as HTTP. Depending on the clients request is how it is decided which outer layer is used. The outer layer high protocols then process the request through the SSL. If the client requests a non-secure connection then it passes through the TCP/IP layer and the server application or data. If the client requests a secure connection the SSL layer initiates the secure connection to process to begin.

HTTPS;-
HTTPS is short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS is used to determine how a message is formatted, how it is transmitted and what precautions web servers and browsers should take. HTTPS is a request response protocol which means for example a Web browser initiates a request to a server, typically by opening a TCP/IP connection then the request itself comprises

 a request line,

 a set of request headers, and

 an entity.

The server sends a response that comprises

 a status line,

 a set of response headers, and

RSA Certificates;-
This is short for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. The RSA certificate is a professional program that offers professionals in technology the knowledge, skills and credentials that enables them to keep up with security systems within an enterprise. Certificates are basically just an implementation of digital signatures. One certificate is used to sign the data using a private key, and a corresponding verification certificate is given to the user along with the signature and the data. The user uses the verification certificate to verify that the file matches its signature.

Unit II

Security and Encryption

Need for Security and Encryption in Ecommerce

Security is an essential part of any transaction that takes place over the internet. Customers will lose his/her faith in e-business if its security is compromised. Following are the essential requirements for safe e-payments/transactions −

Confidentiality − Information should not be accessible to an unauthorized person. It should not be intercepted during the transmission.

Integrity − Information should not be altered during its transmission over the network.

We all have the one common question, whether we have received the same data that the sender has sent. Now it is the duty for integrity for the correctness of the information that has been transmitted or received or displayed on a website over the internet.

Integrity can ensure that information on the internet has not been altered in any way by an unauthorized party. It maintains the consistency, accuracy, and trustworthiness of the information over its entire life cycle.

Customer perspective on integrity: Is the information I have transmitted or received is altered?

Merchant perspective on integrity: Is the information present on the website is altered without an authorization? Is the information received from the customer is valid or not?

Example: The most common threat will be “would any unauthorized person will intercept and redirect payment into a different account” since ecommerce sites prefer online transfer mostly.

Let us consider a subscription model, where you will give credit card details for a bill payment to the merchant. If someone added extra cost on your credit card bill without both yours or merchant’s knowledge, then you need to pay extra money for something you haven't purchased.

Availability − Information should be available wherever and whenever required within a time limit specified.

Continuous availability of the data is the key to provide a better customer experience in ecommerce. The continuous availability of the ecommerce website increases online visibility, search engine rankings, and site traffic. Data which is present on the website must be secured and available 24x7x 365 for the customer without downtime. If it is not, it will be difficult to gain a competitive edge and survive in the digital world.

Customer perspective: Can I access the site at any time from anywhere?

Merchant perspective: Whether my site is operating without any downtime?

Example: An ecommerce website can be flooded with useless traffic that causes to shut down your site, making impossible for the user to access the site.

Authenticity − There should be a mechanism to authenticate a user before giving him/her an access to the required information.

In ecommerce, since both the customer and seller need to trust each other, they must remain as who they are in real. Both the seller and buyer must provide proof of their original identity so that the ecommerce transaction can happen securely between them.

Every ecommerce site uses authenticity as a tool to ensure the identity of the person over the internet. In ecommerce, fraudulent identity and authentication are also possible, which makes identity a difficult process. Some common ways to ensure a person's identity are customer log in using a password.

Customer perspective: Who am I dealing with? Who can I assure the person I am dealing with is who they claim to be?

Merchant perspective: Is the customer that I am communicating are a real person? If not, what could be their identity?

Example: Some users can use a fake email address to access any of the ecommerce services.

Non-Repudiability − It is the protection against the denial of order or denial of payment. Once a sender sends a message, the sender should not be able to deny sending the message. Similarly, the recipient of message should not be able to deny the receipt.

Good business depends on both buyers and sellers. They must not deny any facts or rules once they accept that there should not be any repudiation.

Non-repudiation confirms whether the information sent between the two parties was received or not. It ensures that the purchase cannot be denied by the person who completed the transaction. In other words, it’s an assurance that anyone cannot deny the validity of transaction.

Mostly non-repudiation uses a digital signature for online transactions because no one can deny the authenticity of their signature on a document.

Customer perspective: Can a party take action on me if I have denied the action?

Merchant perspective: It’s possible for a customer to deny a product after ordering it.

Example: When a merchant doesn’t have enough proof of customers who have ordered with them during a credit card payment transaction, it will not be processed further to the merchant.

Sometimes customers claim that they haven't ordered the product from a particular merchant if they disliked the product later.

Encryption − Information should be encrypted and decrypted only by an authorized user.

Auditability − Data should be recorded in such a way that it can be audited for integrity requirements.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality refers to protecting information from being accessed by an unauthorized person on the internet. In other words, only the people who are authorized can gain access to view or modify or use the sensitive data of any customer or merchants.

According to Juniper Research, nearly 146 billion records will be exposed by criminal data breaches between 2018 and 2023.

One confidentiality breach will be sniffing. It's a program that steals all the important files of the company, individual identity or email message or personal report of the internet user.

Customer perspective: Can someone other than the intended recipient or a person read my message?

Merchant perspective: Whether information on my site can be accessed by the unauthorized person without knowledge?

Example: Ecommerce uses a user name and password to login to their account. Let’s consider this case for resetting the password, where an ecommerce site sends a one-time password to their customer in email or phone number if someone else reads it.

Privacy

Where confidentiality is a concern about the information present during communication, privacy is concerned with personal details. In general, privacy is used to control the usage of information by the customers that they have given to the merchant.

According to Fortune, 1.16 billion email address and passwords are exposed in 2019 through security breaches.

Privacy is a major threat to any online transaction or internet user since personal information has been revealed and there is no way back to disclose them.

Customer perspective: Can I control the usage of information about myself that I have transmitted to the ecommerce site?

Merchant perspective: What if anyone else uses personal data collected as part of the ecommerce transaction? Is there any unauthorized person to access a customer’s personal data?

Example: If a hacker breaks into the ecommerce site, they can gain access to the customer credit card details or any other customer information. This also violates information confidentiality and personal privacy.

Measures to ensure Security

Major security measures are following −

Encryption − It is a very effective and practical way to safeguard the data being transmitted over the network. Sender of the information encrypts the data using a secret code and only the specified receiver can decrypt the data using the same or a different secret code.

Digital Signature − Digital signature ensures the authenticity of the information. A digital signature is an e-signature authenticated through encryption and password.

Security Certificates − Security certificate is a unique digital id used to verify the identity of an individual website or user.

Security Protocols in Internet

We will discuss here some of the popular protocols used over the internet to ensure secured online transactions.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

It is the most commonly used protocol and is widely used across the industry. It meets following security requirements −

Authentication

Encryption

Integrity

Non-reputability

"https://" is to be used for HTTP urls with SSL, where as "http:/" is to be used for HTTP urls without SSL.

Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (SHTTP)

SHTTP extends the HTTP internet protocol with public key encryption, authentication, and digital signature over the internet. Secure HTTP supports multiple security mechanism, providing security to the end-users. SHTTP works by negotiating encryption scheme types used between the client and the server.

Secure Electronic Transaction

It is a secure protocol developed by MasterCard and Visa in collaboration. Theoretically, it is the best security protocol. It has the following components −

Card Holder's Digital Wallet Software − Digital Wallet allows the card holder to make secure purchases online via point and click interface.

Merchant Software − This software helps merchants to communicate with potential customers and financial institutions in a secure manner.

Payment Gateway Server Software − Payment gateway provides automatic and standard payment process. It supports the process for merchant's certificate request.

Certificate Authority Software − This software is used by financial institutions to issue digital certificates to card holders and merchants, and to enable them to register their account agreements for secure electronic commerce.

THE ECOMMERCE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT

What is eCommerce Security?

eCommerce security refers to the principles which guide safe electronic transactions, allowing the buying and selling of goods and services through the Internet, but with protocols in place to provide safety for those involved. Successful business online depends on the customers’ trust that a company has eCommerce security basics in place.

Privacy

One of the most obvious eCommerce security basics is privacy, which in this situation means not sharing information with unauthorized parties. When you shop online, your personal details or account information should not be accessible to anyone except the seller you have chosen to share it with. Any disclosure of that information by the merchant would be a breach of confidentiality. The business is responsible to provide at least the minimum in encryption, virus protection, and a firewall so that bank details and credit card information remain private.

Integrity

A second concept which is crucial within secure eCommerce is the idea of integrity—that none of the information shared online by the customer will be altered in any way. This principle states that a secure transaction includes unchanged data—that the business is only using exactly what was entered into the Internet site by the buyer. Any tampering with information is breaking the confidence of the buyer in the security of the transaction and the integrity of the company in general.

Authentication

For eCommerce to take place, both seller and buyer have to be who they say they are. A business cannot sell unless it’s real, the products are real, and the sale will go through as described online. The buyer must also provide proof of identification so that the merchant can feel secure about the sale. In eCommerce, fraudulent identification and authentication are possible, and many businesses hire an expert to make sure these kinds of eCommerce security basics are in place. Common solutions include technological solutions—customer logins and passwords or additional credit card PINs.

Non-repudiation

Repudiation is denial, and good business depends on both buyers and sellers following through on the part of the transaction which originated with them—not denying those actions. Since eCommerce happens in cyberspace, usually without any live video, it can feel less safe and sure. The legal principle of non-repudiation adds another level of security by confirming that the information which was sent between parties was indeed received and that a purchase or email or signature cannot be denied by the person who completed the transaction.

Customers who don’t feel transactions are secure won’t buy. Hesitation on the part of the buyer will destroy eCommerce potential. Any breach will cost a business in lost revenues and consumer trust. These eCommerce security basics can guide any business owner regarding safe online transaction protocol.

E-commerce embodies several business transactions over utilising electronic systems. E-commerce website involves internal network which might interface with World Wide Web. E-commerce introduced external as well as internal risk to both business and website to which it connected. External threats to e-commerce website are raised from various sources involving electronic economic environment as well as risk related to the external internet. Internal threats come from staff, internal network, management and business processes. The most common risk is security-related issues that relate to the interface among the consumer transactions and network. Intruders pose a security threat to the network through DoS attack that can overwhelm site or theft of private financial information after gaining access to the internal system through vulnerabilities of an e-commerce website. Other security threats related to these websites are summarised as beneath:

Malicious code threats: These types of threats involve worms, viruses and Trojan horses.

Viruses are external threats and have the ability to corrupt files on the website after finding their direction in the internal network. They might be critical as they completely harm the computer system and disrupt normal operations of the computer.
Trojan horse is defined as programming code that performs destructive functions. They attack computers while downloading something.

Wi-Fi eavesdropping: It is one of the simplest ways in the e-commerce to steal private information. It is recognised as virtual listening of data that is shared across Wi-Fi network that is not encrypted. It occurs on personal and public computers as well.

Other threats: Certain other threats which are raised are data packet sniffing, port scanning and IP spoofing. An attacker can involve a sniffer to attack an information packet flow and scan unique data packs. Through IP spoofing, it becomes hard to trace the intruder. The target is here to modify the source address and provide it such a look that it must look as though it is derived from another computer.

Techniques to combat e-commerce threats

Encryption:

It is defined as a mechanism of converting normal information into an encoded content that cannot be read by others except the one who sends or receive this message.

Having digital certificates:

It is known as digital certificate being issued by a trustworthy third party company. An SSL certificate is essential because it gives a high authentication level to the website. The main function of this certificate is to secure an e-commerce website from unintended attacks like Man-in-middle attacks.

Risk of social media marketing

Time intensive:

It is time-consuming and laborious to maintain interactive social media presence. There is need to monitor every social network, respond to queries and post valuable updates.

Negative feedback:

The users of social media have the freedom to post whatever they desire. Sometimes, an unhappy customer leaves angry rants related to your business. Moreover, some of the negative feedback comes from the disgruntled employees of the company that makes the complete business look bad.

Potential for embarrassment:

It is simple to get caught up in social media and post anything that comes to mind, having a huge impact on any business.

THREATS IN ECOMMERCE

The world today is coming closer. From communicating with one person sitting at the other end of the world to finalizing business deals, everything has become fast and quick. The reason for this is the massive internet boom which has made life easier for the average person by providing a plethora of options. What’s more, it has also made your shopping experience a more interesting and enjoyable one. You can now get practically everything from online shopping.

The E-commerce splash

This boom we would call as the ‘e-commerce’ boom. It has been a total game changer of sorts for shopping to the people. The consumer can now do more personalized shopping with a hoard of options available. The whole shopping experience has become very convenient. The thing with e-commerce is that it is not just maximizing but also changing. Today the consumer faces a maze of different online choices which were not available or even imaginable some years ago.

However, it has also led to a proliferation of cyber-attacks and online threats. One of the main reasons is the inadequate technical built up and proper protection of the systems. Poor security and very high levels of vulnerability in the arrangements is also one of the main reasons for the cyber-attacks.

What is e-commerce security?

E-commerce security is protection the various e-commerce assets from unauthorized access, its use, or modification.

What is an e-commerce threat?

In simple words, you can say that using the internet for unfair means with an intention of stealing, fraud and security breach.

There are various types of e-commerce threats. Some are accidental, some are purposeful, and some of them are due to human error. The most common security threats are phishing attacks, money thefts, data misuse, hacking, credit card frauds, and unprotected services.

Inaccurate management-One of the main reason for e-commerce threats is poor management. When security is not up to the mark, it poses a very dangerous threat to the networks and systems. Also, security threats occur when there are no proper budgets are allocated for the purchase of anti-virus software licenses.

Price Manipulation-Modern e-commerce systems often face price manipulation problems. These systems are fully automated; right from the first visit to the final payment getaway. Stealing is the most common intention of price manipulation. It allows an intruder to slide or install a lower price into the URL and get away with all the data.

Snowshoe Spam-Now spam is something which is very common. Almost each one of us deals with spam emails in our mailbox. The spam messages problem has never been actually solved, but now it is turning out to be a not so general issue. The reason for this is the very nature of a spam message. Spam is something which is sent by one person, but unfortunately, new development is taking place in the cyber world. It is called as snowshoe spam. Unlike regular spam it is not sent from one computer but is sent from many users. In such a case it becomes difficult for the anti-spam software to protect the spam messages.

Malicious code threats-These code threats typically involve viruses, worms, Trojan horses.

Viruses are normally external threats and can corrupt the files on the website if they find their way in the internal network. They can be very dangerous as they destroy the computer systems completely and can damage the normal working of the computer. A virus always needs a host as they cannot spread by themselves.
Worms are very much different and are more serious than viruses. It places itself directly through the internet. It can infect millions of computers in a matter of just a few hours.
A Trojan horse is a programming code which can perform destructive functions. They normally attack your computer when you download something. So always check the source of the downloaded file.

Hacktivism-The full form of Hacktivism is hacking activism. At first, it may seem like you should hardly be aware of this cyber threat. After all, it is a problem not directly related to you. Why should you be bothered at all? However, that’s not the case. Firstly hacktivists do not target directly to those associated only with politics. It can also be a socially motivated purpose. It is typically using social media platforms to bring to light social issues. It can also include flooding an email address with so much traffic that it temporarily shuts down.

Wi-Fi Eavesdropping-It is also one of the easiest ways in e-commerce to steal personal data. It is like a “virtual listening” of information which is shared over a Wi-Fi network which is not encrypted. It can happen on the public as well as on personal computers.

Other threats-Some other threats which include are data packet sniffing, IP spoofing, and port scanning. Data packet sniffing is also normally called as sniffers. An intruder can use a sniffer to attack a data packet flow and scan individual data packs. With IP spoofing it is very difficult to track the attacker. The purpose here is to change the source address and give it such a look that it should look as though it originated from another computer.

Ways to combat e-commerce threats

Developing a thorough implementation plan is the first step to minimize a cyber threat.

Encryption-It is the process of converting a normal text into an encoded text which cannot be read by anyone except by the one who sends or receives the message.

Having digital certificates

It is a digital certificate which is issued by a reliable third party company. A digital certificate contains the following things the name of the company (Only in EV SSL Certificate), the most important digital certificate serial number, expiry date and date of issue. An EV SSL Certificate is necessary which provides a high level of authentication to your website. The very function of this kind of certificate is to exclusively protect an e-commerce website from unwanted attacks such as Man-In_middle Attack. Also, there are different Types of SSL Certificates available (such as Wildcard SSL, SAN, SGC, Exchange Server certificate, etc.) which you can choose according to the need of your website.

Perform a security audit-a routine examination of the security procedures of the firm.

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