Electronic Commerce

Earlier this year, Durlacher Research reported that 48% of large UK companies with Websites planned to implement transaction based services over the internet within the next twelve months. According to Stan Dolberg, director of software strategy service,
Forrester Research:

'The value of trading over via the internet will increase from $53billion dollars in 1998 to $210 billion by 2001.
By the year 2000 most organisations will be doing commerce online.'

 

Electronic commerce aka Internet commerce, online commerce, is used to describe the act of doing business online.
It includes purchasing products via online services as well as electronic data interchange (EDI)
i.e. when a company's computer queries and transmits purchase orders to another company's computer.
With electronic commerce, infomation is stored and transmitted electronically and paper is not needed
for transactions to take place.

A wide range of technologies are used in electronic commerce, notably: E -mail; X- 400 messaging,
SMTP, EDI, the Internet; Intranets; Extranets: WWW; and EDI.

Kathleen B Earley, vice president of AT&T Easy Commerce Services, speaking at internet expo,
held at the Hynes Convention Center, Boston Nov 30 98 categorised electronic applications under three areas:

 

catalogues, annual reports and news.

The first type of electronic application is the one most adapted to the internet because it is not security sensitive. User speculation on internet security has led to people being wary of accepting the second and third types of electronic applications.

However at present quite a few companies have been bold enough to use the internet for business transactions. The banking, supermarket, finance and insurance industries are perhaps the most prominent examples.