An Example of E-Commerce success and its causes......

An example of an E-Commerce success is Amazon.com, which is presently ruling the Internet business with its best marketing techniques and expertise in relation to the market trends and demands of its customers. Amazon.com opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection and it has gained its popularity among youngsters and adults.

It seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and try to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewellery, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial. Its success in generating profit during year 2003 after the collapse of dot com bubble, has earned its fame in the e-commerce world.

The cause of E-commence success is Amazon.com focuses on customer-value proposition. To make customer more easy and convenient, Amazon.com today launched Amazon TextBuyIt, a new service that lets customers use text messages to find and buy products sold on Amazon.com. With the addition of TextBuyIt to Amazon's existing mobile offering, including its mobile site and mobile iPhone site, customers can now shop, compare prices, and buy from Amazon.com virtually anywhere they are, with any mobile device, using either text messages or their mobile device's web browser. Amazon.com has its affiliates operate websites and also provides global deliveries to certain country.

In order to achieve success in their goal of E-commerce, employees also become one of the causes of E-commerce success. This is because Amazon.com hires local employees in foreign countries to introduce more channels and branches of Amazon.com in the foreign countries to provide them a familiar look to this e-commerce company. Besides that, those employees can also help in them gathering information about the local market and the demand of the people.e of those countries.

The history and evolution of E-commerce

E-commerce (electronic commerce) is one of the most popular activities on the Web is shopping. Ecommerce became possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. Since that date thousands of businesses have taken up residence at web sites.

Originally, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. The growth and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking in the 1980s were also forms of electronic commerce. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

However, the Internet began to advance in popularity among the general public in 1994, it took approximately four years to develop the security protocols (for example, HTTP) and DSL which allowed rapid access and a persistent connection to the Internet. In 2000 a great number of business companies in the United States and Western Europe represented their services in the World Wide Web. At this time the meaning of the word ecommerce was changed. People began to define the term ecommerce as the process of purchasing of available goods and services over the Internet using secure connections and electronic payment services.

Amazon is one of the first ecommerce businesses to establish an affiliate marketing program, and nowadays the company gets about 40% of its sales from affiliates and third party sellers who list and sell goods on the web site.

In conclusion, Online business and eCommerce is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Today the largest e-commerce is Business-to-Business (B2B). Businesses involved in B2B sell their goods to other businesses. It can help us take advantage of the lower cost, greater efficiency, and higher sales volume of doing business electronically. By implementing e-commerce, our business gains the advantages of increased production and enhanced efficiency, instantaneous information sharing between departments, easy management of supply chain, lower cost for transactions and order handling, more, better customer data and better access and service and faster turnaround.

An example of an E-Commerce failure and its causes

Many newly formed DotCom companies around the world failed as the online bubble began to burst in mid-2000. It was predicted that a high percentage of e-commerce start-ups or newly formed pure DotCom companies would fail. The causes of failure can be separated to two main categories – controllable and uncontrollable causes.

Controllable causes that involve strategic causes that is lack of business experience. Most wrong decisions were made because DotCom entrepreneurs lacked a clear understanding of business fundamentals in the areas of finance, distribution and inventory and were not able to formulate a sound business strategy which was required before the launch of any products or services in the market. Some of the failed DotComs; for example, Furniture.com and Living.com had insufficient back-end operations to support front-end demands.

The controllable causes also included operational causes that is involve poor customer support. Effective communication is deemed vital for the survival of most businesses, and e-mail has become the primary mode of communication. Technical errors on a company's Web site often directed customer inquiries to a Webmaster instead of a corporate representative.

Besides that, uncontrollable causes that involve behavioral causes that is over-expectation. Over-expectation is seen as one of the many factors behind many failed DotComs. Many firms did not have adequate planning when they entered into the market with a dream that the products they were offering were good enough to attract consumers. Many e-commerce companies were slow to realize that buyers were not comfortable with the security, error rate, complexity or confusing navigation embedded in the company's Web site. Others were simply not satisfied with the process of purchasing goods online since they wanted to touch and feel the products before buying, at least for the new products they had not seen earlier.

Technical causes that is Internet security problems. Most of us who have purchased items via the Internet have felt reluctant about the transaction at some point usually when entering our credit card number. Furthermore, some security threats did not come from outsiders, but were instead the work of insiders. Even today, companies that spend a tremendous amount of money on their own security staff are not completely safe. Despite much progress in Internet security, it is still considered a barrier towards e-commerce progress.