Discuss how e-commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support.

With the advance of technologies now a day, e-commerce is widely being use by most of the organization no matter profit or non profit organization as well as individual. With the existing of e-commerce, it enables to reduce cycle time, improve employee empowerment and facilitates customer support.

Reduce cycle time
Before the turn up of e-commerce, traditional approach commerce required middleman to transfer the goods from producers to the customers and this process is time consuming and even worse some of the goods are not delivered on time. Beside that, e-commerce may help to reduce cycle time by eliminate those middleman and the sellers can directly trade with customers and it enable to shorten the supply chain process. Apart from that, it provides 24 hours store services such as make orders anytime at any regions with difference time zone. This will expand their business to World Wide Web.

Improve employee empowerment
Employees are important resources to organization because they can help organization handling daily transactions as well as problems. With the advancement of technologies such as computerized decision aids enable employees to make decision by improving their empowerment. This can enable them to manage and edit critical details about e-commerce activities. Apart from that, it gives authority to the employees. In addition, it will increase the efficiency and the productivity of organization due to perspective of respect. Thus, it improves employees’ morale and loyalty.

Facilitate customer services
E-commerce provides convenience to customer and facilitates customer services such as receive complaints, question and answer session and user guideline of product to customers. The customer services provided by the e-commerce organization are 24 hours basis which mean customer can e-mail or log in to their web site anytime at anywhere. Beside that, customers also can voice out their opinion and idea via online. This enables the organization to know more about customer preferences in order to improve their services and satisfied the customers’ needs.

An Example of an E-Commerce Failure and its Causes

There are extremely successful virtual e-commerce companies such as eBay, Google, or Yahoo! in recent years. However, there are large numbers of e-commerce companies that are unable to maintain their profit through e-commerce. Some well-known business-to-consumers (B2C) failures include Pets.com, Xpeditor, Chemdex.com, Webvan.com, Boo.com, Furniture.com, Bid.com, Petstore.com and so on.

eToys.com is one of the top 10 dot-com flops. Etoys.com was launched in 1997, and it was founded by the CEO, who name Toby Lenk, COO Frank Han and Idealab Founder Bill Gross. eToys filed for an initial public offering (IPO) valued at $115 million in February 1999. However, eToys delayed the IPO due to the acquisition of BabyCenter Inc., announced in April 1999. EToys seem like the best idea for those busy parents; it offered them a chance to order thousands of toys in every category from the comfort of their homes. Beside that, the site also had fun features, the features including gift recommendations by age and information about popular characters, from Madeline to Barney.

On May 20, 1999, eToys opened the sale of stock to the public. This helped generate praise for the online toy category. Despite the positives, eToys suffered a black eye after it failed to deliver some orders in time for Christmas 1999. eToys’ lead was put in jeopardy after major competitive of eToys; Toys “R” Us and Amazon.com formed a partnership in August 2000.

The cause of failure is competitive environment. The eToys was competing with the companies such as Toys R’ Us that had not only an online presence, but also the perceived stable infrastructure of bricks and mortal. eToys.com strategy to offer more diverse products conflicted with the strong “toy store” branding they had created. The price wars and high customer acquisition costs also caused problem for this e-tailer.

Another cause of eToys.com failure in e-commerce is because of ineffective customer service or misinformation about products and services, such as failed to deliver the order on time would destroy the image of the company, and the first impression of new customers. In addition, the negative response from customers is also another cause which will lead the dot-com filed into bankruptcy in E-business.

However, e-Toys. com was reborn in October 2001 as a subsidiary of KB Toys. In 2004, eToys separated form KB Toys

An Example Of An E-Commerce Success And Its Causes

Development of science and technology industry nowaday, more and more people be trained in IT industry. Therefore engage in computer and use of online are easily adopt by all level of society. Buying and selling through online is a common trend in this decade and it needed minimal investment to setup, almost everyone, anywhere, anytime can engage in E-commerce. As compare to traditional method, buyers need went to the certain locations to buy their needs at the working hours.

Amazon.com, Inc is an example of e-commerce success. Amazon was launched in July 1995 and founded by Jeff Bezos.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn. Amazon established separate website at different country in China, Japan, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Amazon success due to offer Earth’s Biggest Selection to the customers through online which millions of items by categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial. Besides, customers can find and discover anything they might or wish to buy at lowest possible prices than market price. The variables items sell online can meet different demand and requirement of customers as well as different background and countries consumers.

Apart from that, Amazon success is strong focuses on customer. Amazon always keep updated the information and introduce new and unique products to keep the customers coming back as there is no entry barriers on the Internet. In addition, Amazon able offering competitive prices, straightforward web design and friendly interface and convenient payment system to the customer as well as let all retailers sell goods remotely by internet, phone or mail order, credit card and so on. Example, on 5th January 2009, Amazon announced that it will offer customers the ability to instantly purchase, rent and watch digital movies and TV episodes from its popular video service, Amazon Video On Demand(more than 40,000 movies and television shows), via the Roku Digital Video Player.

The story begins…………
Year 2002
My family bought the first computer to me when I’m in form four. At that time, I use my computer mostly for doing an assignment and most of the time is playing game (not online game). Sometime I may use it to surf internet. Due to nothing to see and search, I seldom log in to it. The frequency I’m log in to the internet is “once in the blue moon”.

Year 2007
As an undergraduate student, I’m now having my personal laptop (bought using my PTPTN). Now for me, the usage of my laptop is to surf internet. It become one of my routine to log in into the internet to search for the information for my assignment, check my email, playing online games and also connecting with my friend who are scattered all around the world through MSN. For a girl, shopping is one of the most favorite activities. However I dislike walking out of my house. Mainly because of the traffic jam and the cost of the fuel and the most important no “friend” accompany. (Shopping alone very boring). With the today technology I can even shopping around the world (no need take airplane and car). What I need is only a computer with internet. I can buy the things and pay it through online. The frequency I’m log into internet “all the time, anywhere at any place” (if nothing to do).

Year 2009
Now I’m year three and having e-commerce subject. Due to the e-commerce assignment (which is in a group), I started to find the information about the e-commerce to understanding more in order to do my assignment.

Let us start the topic of the ecommerce with

The full name of E-commerce is called electronic commerce. It was founded late in the 1970’s. It meant the facilitation of commercial transactions (“buy and sell”) electronically. The first way came from the development of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI is invented in 1960’s however; many companies still couldn’t do business electronically with each other because there were different EDI formats. Eventually, in 1984, EDI was replaced by ASC X12, a protocol developed by the American National Standards Institute in 1979. It is for sharing business documents and information electronically. It is helped companies to carry out their dealings in more reliable manner than the international trade (import and export) and global sourcing. It also enabled the business firms to indulge in a sort of beneficial electronic transaction and facilitated the interchange of vital business

Eight years later, the next important phase in the History of E-Commerce was the development. In 1992, Mosaic web-browser was developed and it designed a downloadable browser called Netscape in 1999. Napster, an online application used to share music files for free. This expands the scope and possibility of electronic commercial transaction.

The development and adaptation of DSL and Red Hat Linux benefited the process of online business transaction. DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet. For Linux, it gave users another platform other than Windows which was reliable and open-source.

In 1995, it marked the beginning of two giants of Amazon and EBay which were famous in these days have of their names synonymous with Internet use and e-commerce. They are the pioneers when it comes to selling online. These companies change the face of the Internet, as well as the way we buy things.

Today, the history of e-commerce has moves forward. There are numbers of payment options and abilities from PayPal (electronic debit from a bank account or by a credit card) to e-Checks (electronic check payment method) to credit cards to systems of barter. It is not restricted to consumer items and novelties. There also Web sites where you can order groceries for home delivery or you can order pizza dinner online as well. With e-commerce, it is possible to find specialty items for almost anyone. It also making it possible to find nearly anything you want, and have shipped directly to you.

Early 2000, there is major merger between AOL and Time Warner which is another important step towards the development of E-Commerce. This merged bring economically beneficial.
In February 2000, hackers attacked some major e-commerce host, including Yahoo, EBay and Amazon. In these incidents, the needs to improved security become crucial in the development of electronic commerce.

Apart from that, we will see a larger presence of traditional companies, such as Wal-Mart, on the Internet. It is believed that the companies will take this mixed strategy of having stores online and offline in order to be success and compete.

Today the largest electronic commerce is Business-to-Business (B2B) which is online businesses selling to Businesses. In 2001, this form of e-commerce had around $700 billion in transactions. Other varieties growing today include Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) where consumers sell to each other, through auction sites. Another form of ecommerce is Peer-to-Peer (P2P) allows users to share resources and files directly.

E-commerce’ sales continue to grow in the next few years. In the end of 2007, e-commerce sales accounted for 3.4 percent of total sales. In 2008, the domain Amazon.com attracted about 615 million customers every year. The most popular feature of the web site is the review system that gives the ability for visitors to submit their reviews and rate for any product on a rating scale from one to five stars.

The discovering the convenience of shopping from home by people, it’s clear that the history of e commerce isn’t a closed book, but will continue to change as online shopping becomes more and more popular in the future.