Chapter 9 - E-business and E-commerce

 

E-commerce is the act of conducting business exchanges over the internet. There are a few avenues through which e-commerce can be conducted:
- Business-to-consumer, known as B2C
- Business- to business, known as B2B
- Consumer-to-consumer, known as C2C
- Business-to-employee, known as B2E
- E-government, concerned with governmental exchanges
- Mobile commerce, known as m-commerce

E-commerce relies on mechanisms to work sufficiently. These mechanisms include:
- Electronic catalogues
- Electronic auctions, including forward and reverse auctions
- Electronic storefronts
- Electronic mall or cyber mall
- Electronic marketplace
- Electronic cheques, known as e-checks

There are many electronic payment methods for convenience sake, including:
- Electronic credit cards
- Virtual credit cards
- Purchasing cards
- Electronic cash
- Person-to-person payments

However, even though these are all great things, everything has benefits and downsides.
The benefits of e-commerce:
- to organisations - it localises abroad markets and makes them accessible, and reduces the costs of processing, distributing and retrieving information.
- to customers - it makes many products accessible at any time
- to society - it offers easy and convenient delivery of information and products to anywhere in the world.

The limitations to e-commerce include:
- Technological limitations, namely the lack of universal security standards, insufficient bandwidth and expensive accessibility
- Non-technological limitations, namely the perception of insecurity, unresolved legal issues and lacking the customer-base and sellers

 

Reference from:

Management Information Systems 1st Edition

Gray, H., Issa, T., Pye, G., Troshani, I., Rainer, R. K., Prince, B., & Hugh J. W. (2015). Management information systems. John Wiley.