About e-commerce

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Practical 1 - Familiarisation with E-Commerce via a set of activities and reflections

Activity 01. Questions about E-Commerce nationally and locally

Question: Are SMEs embracing the Internet in the UK?

Are your findings supported locally?

Answer: The answer to this question lies in how well a business understands E-Commerce opportunities in its environment and implements strategies to take advantage of the opportunities. The number of small businesses that provide Internet services have experience tremendous growth because of the increase in demand for Internet access. One of the major opportunities for entrepreneurs and small business in the future will be in the area of B2B.

Market places have become an Internet application for B2B procurement using an auction mechanism where business that supply an industry bid for the opportunity to sell their goods.

Having an Internet presence allows a company to remain open 7 days, 24 hours a week. Additionally, in many cases the consumer will not be able to tell the difference between a small versus big business, thus limiting the liability of smallness.

In the UK, online shopping is outperforming the high street with over ?26.5 billion spent online in the first half of 2008 alone, an increase of 38% over the same period the previous year. Yet the e-commerce world is constantly maturing and improving, with flaws and shortcomings being addressed, giving way to today's second generation of software that meets the needs of even more businesses. Source: http://www.smeweb.com/sales-and-marketing/features/capitalising-on-e-commerce-in-the-downturn-030906.html

Analysing SME's attitude to the Internet, showed encouraging results with 84% of small business owners having a website and 97% having an e-mail account. More business is done more on the Internet and SME's should be best placed for share of the market. However things are seldom that straight forward and where the internet is concerned, having a company website is simply not enough. The site should firstly be of a good design, avoid the temptation of homemade or cheap sites, they will invariably end up costing more than they worth. Secondly, the site needs to be 'optimised' for search engine recognition.

Wide spread use of fast broadband internet connections is cited as one of the main reasons SME's have been able to begin to utilize the internet to generate sales. Every year the numbers of small companies with the broadband connections are increasing and internet sales are increasing rapidly.

Reflection 01 What is your experience of the use of E-Commerce by companies in your geographical area or sector of industry?

Example: Easy Auction

Easy Auction has 10 years experience in the internet auction sector, and provides internet auction lots and articles to clients throughout the United States and United Kingdom. The company is based in the UK, but has a global following.

Easy Auction is designed to meet the demand of cost-conscious consumers by delivering a broad range of competatively priced products. With a friendly website and blog, the business also has polite staff helping clients to save time and money.

Featuring a huge array of products, the items sourced by the business are affordable and suitable for any consumer. Available on the internet, the products are tailored to individual needs and can improve quality of life.

Easy Auction has a large group of satisfied customers, situated globally and including individuals from many different backgrounds.

Easy Auction exceeded my expectations when it came to the range of products and their rapid response to my queries. The articles on the website and the intuitive navigation also enhanced my experience greatly.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in eBay or internet auctions.

Activity 02. E-Commerce development provision

Question: What impact does E-Commerce have on an organisation's processes?

Answer: Concerning the processes that ought to be included many countries want to restrict the definition to the purchasing and selling aspect incorporated in the above definitions, many others want to include other types of business processes, such as marketing and advertising. Developing countries will also favour a definition that includes business activities that go beyond purchasing and selling, given the restrictions that some of those countries face in conducting online payments.

Impact is that it reduces transaction costs; allocates recourses better; increases economies of scale; improves the competitiveness of business in general; increases efficiency; generates important changes in the management and production processes of business.

Reflection 02 For a SME and large organisations, which are the most prominent software package for E-Commerce/E-business?

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a system which integrates various business data in a single database and provides cross function reporting on click of a single button.

ERP was made for large organisations but, now it is made for the medium and even for small organisations. In this global competitive market, organisations need to upgrade with latest technologies. Most of the large organisations are using enterprise resource planning system. To deal with large organisation SME's needed to work on a similar type of technologies. Here importance of ERP system for SME's increases.

There are lots of business benefits of "enterprise software". Apart from all other basic benefits, enterprise software gives an information system with three important capabilities i.e.,

Consistency and reliability of business data across the organisation

Streamlined transaction processing within and outside organisation

Provides operations level reporting on a click of a button.

Activity 03 Britain's standing in World e-Commerce

Question: How is Britain doing in World terms? Find some up to date statistics on e.g. Trading volumes, online shoppers, broadband adoption etc. Post it on the discussion board. Be sure to cite your sources.

New statistics on the overall shopping trends-over 875 million consumers have shopped online- the number of internet shoppers up 40% in two years.

Among internet users with internet access using it shop, the highest % shopping online is found in:

South korea-99%

Uk-97%

Germany-97%

Japan-97%

Us-94%

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