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

E-commerce has had a huge impact in our lives. It has capability to reduce cycle time. If you need insurance you can get this over the web, if you need to do grocery shopping you can order over the internet and if you need any electrical appliance, books or DVDs you can buy from an online store like Amazon. It can be faster and more convenient. E-commerce can enhance transactional purchasing by providing end users with quick and easy to use electronic systems such as electronic catalogues for selecting and purchasing their requirement from preferred suppliers. Purchases can be made in seconds via a few clicks of the mouse vs. traditional shopping that involves traveling to stores, parking, searching for products, standing in check-out lines, etc.

With e-commerce, employees' empowerment can improve. Employees can respond quickly to customer requests to satisfy customers. It also enables employees finding the right information, keeping the information in a readily accessible place, and making the information known to everyone in the firm. Autonomous decision making can make by the employee without consulting a boss or manager.

E-commerce can help to facilitate customer support such as provide mail-in service. The manufacturer will repair your equipment if you mail it in. Typical turnaround time is about four day. For example, Intel Company provides phone numbers and mailing addresses for contacting Intel Customer Support worldwide to customers. If customers meet the troubles, they can mail to the company thus help to fix the customer problem. E-commerce creates a simple and convenience way for customer to purchase goods and services.On line site are time consuming compared to the traditional store. Customers can direct get the latest informations and promotions by visiting online stores.

An example of an E-Commerce failure and its causes

is a place whereby buyers and sellers trade almost anything to each other. E-Bay is the world’s online marketplace. Almost every one is familiar with E-Bay because almost everywhere you can see the advertisement for example you can see it when u search around in internet. Even you can know it from your friend and relative. E-Bay is the most popular online marketplace amount all. Even a primary school student knows about it and search around to get what they want. A lot of secondary student try to do some business to earn some pocket money through E-Bay. From the brief definition above, I am sure you can know how powerful and how famous E-Bay world is.

You can access E-Bay website through here !

To be successful everything, there has to work on Marketing, Sales, Quality, Pricing, and Customer Service. However, there also have some reasons why eBay businesses fail.

Here are the top Three reasons why E-Bay businesses fail:

1) Not Accepting Credit Cards Turns Away Bidders
Thousands of bidders worry about Internet fraud. Several studies by eBay and Yahoo have positively concluded that accepting credit cards will increase your auction bids anywhere from 100% to 300%. This is even truer on web site sales, where accepting credit cards can boost sales over 500%! However, the E-Bay does not accepting credit cards payment.

2) Weak Headlines and Poor Auction Description Lose Bids
There are over seven million items listed on eBay every day. Your headline must stand out above the competition to attract bidders. A great headline should contain two key elements: "Key words" that are searchable, and "emotional words" designed to attract attention.Your headline should also include "emotional" words designed to attract a bidder's attention. These words include: new, rare, unique, sexy, secret, unbelievable, super-value, etc. You should not call something "rare" if it is not. But, there are other adjectives that work well in headlines. Besides the emotional words you can use words such as exquisite, charming, wonderful, mint, perfect, clean, superb, etc. Just make sure you are accurate.

3) Poor Images Can Turn Off Sellers
The saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" is never more true than with on-line auctions. Not having a photo of your item will greatly reduce your bids, and lead to unprofitable or unsuccessful auctions. Not only must you have a photograph of what you are selling, the photo must be accurate and revealing.

An example of an E-commerce success and its causes

was launched in 1995. It is an American electronic commerce (e-commerce) company in Seattle, Washington.Amazon.com was one of the first major companies to sell goods by Internet. It is known for its candid reviews and its capabilities for recommending products to its customers. It has come out with the slogan “…and you're done”.

Below are the causes that Amazon.com success in e-commerce

1.A popular feature of Amazon.com is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product. The review feature is an important and highly influential function for customers and one of the main reasons for Amazon.com success at selling books. As with book reviews anywhere, the buyer must beware that all reviewers have bias. Under normal circumstances, reviews give the reader at least a modest basis for evaluating a given book.

2. Quality is necessary in everyday life and business. Amazon.com "remains the leader among e-tailers" in customer satisfaction according to theAmerican Customer Satisfaction Index's fourth-quarter 2007 survey. The key to Amazon.com's success is a strong focus on customer.Amazon always introduce new and unique products to keep the customers coming back as there is no entry barriers on the Internet. Amazon.com is really strong about thinking about customer need. Amazon.com able offering competitive prices, straightforward web design and friendly interface and convenient payment system to the customer.There are lists millions of unique items in categories such as electronics, kitchen and housewares, books, music, DVDs, videos, photography equipment, toys, software, computer and video games, tools and hardware, outdoor living and wireless products can be choose by the customer.

3. Amazon.com has significantly grabbed the electronic business by selling its online books and now electronic items and other stuff. Nonetheless the effective management and consumer identification in the market lead Amazon.com to achieve tremendous success in the filed of e-commerce. It in true sense made business via Internet a wealthy way to improve profits and increase revenues. The strategy to work better and adopting a strong base of selling products marks Amazon different from the rest of the e-commerce organizations.

The History and Evolution of E-commerce

Nowadays, e-commerce have become very important as part of our lives. Most of us make business transactions online on such a regular basis that it is difficult to imagine a time when you were not able to do so. Despite this, the history of e-commerce is actually a relatively short history. It began less than fifty years ago and its humble beginnings look nothing like the kind of electronic business transactions that we see today. Even up until the 1990’s, online business wasn’t a reality for the average person.

E-commerce mean the buying and selling of goods and services over the Internet. The development of electronic commerce (E-commerce) has change over the time. Preliminary, it refers to any commerce that takes place electronically. This includes ATM and credit card transactions as well as the ability to do billing and invoicing through electronic methods. it took hold until the late 1970's and grew steadily throughout the 1980's. During this time, many people started to use credit cards on a regular basic and that set the foundation for e-commerce to get a toehold in society. From the 1990 year onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

In 1995, Amazon and eBay were launched and really to start their business through out the Internet. Both eBay and Amazon paved the way for today's e-commerce merchant. Consumers can buy almost anything online, including shoes, home goods and even a real shark's tooth.

Until now, e-commerce has become wide known by everyone. Most of the student of the University and College has the need to learn to e-commerce as it is important to improve out knowledge. Just like my University—University Tunku Abdul Rahman, the E-commerce is one of my main subject in this semester. So, it is necessary for everyone to learn it.

For some information, this is the video of the e-commerce for evolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW4X3b_j0eE