An example of success e-commerce and its causes

The one in which the e-commerce seems to have been success is eBay. eBay is the world’s largest online trading community which offering users an opportunity to come together in one internet site and be able to buy and trade a wide range of items. It allows people to pursue their interests and their passions in the areas of their hobbies and collectibles.

Many internet companies have come and gone, some have failed within the first year while others like eBay manage to stay around for years is because of its marketing strategy. They have set in a series of television and radio commercials that are fun and creative which makes consumers more interested in the company and its services. eBay also offers people the ability to purchase items they want or need at prices often times lower than retail value through online auctioning system.

eBay is as successful as it has been because it allows people to often times connect with some very fond and special early childhood memories. It could be anything such as collecting baseball cards, toy soldiers, barbie dolls and so forth. It also allows people to make that connection and relive a lot of those very vivid and fond memories that they have from an earlier period of time.

Another factor that helps in the success of eBay is that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar. They enjoy looking around for merchandise. The other component is that they enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain and haggle a little bit over the price. eBay’s auction format allows users to do that.

eBay has expanded into other market as well such as China, India, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and Taiwan. eBay remains one of the top auction sites even with rising competitors like Amazon, Yahoo, and Overstock.com. There recent acquisitions of other markets helped to more than guarantee their survival for years to come.

Discuss how E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees' empowerment and facilitate customer support

E-Commerce brings a lot of advantages to our daily lives. For example, the cycle time for each transaction can be reduced through e-commerce. Cycle time is the total time from the beginning to the end of your process, as defined by you and your customer. Cycle time includes process time and spending time in waiting for next action. For example, e-commerce can reduce sales cycle time by selling product through internet instead of face to face meet the customer. In addition, e-commerce saves the time to process the document needed for sales transaction as the process carry out through the internet is faster than the process carry out manually.

E-commerce provides company catalog flexibility and high speed online updating by the direct “link” capability to access information which were existed in the web site of the company. The employees can update the e-catalog anytime, whether adding new products or adjusting prices, without wasting time in obtaining approval from superior in the company. It helps to save time by eliminating the process of employees in obtaining approval from management and it also improves employees’ empowerment in accessing the information of the company.

The internet gives customers the opportunity to browse and shop at their convenience and at their place. They can access the services provided by the company from home or office for 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. The cost of transaction between the buyer and seller can be reduced through e-commerce by eliminating the wastage of time. Besides, it allows messages traverse around the world almost instantaneously. Customers do not need to wait for catalogers to reach onto their hands by post and the cycle time for the transaction can be reduced directly through e-commerce.

An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

With the changing trends of globalization and the development of technology, the growth of e-commerce has boomed in the past few years. However, not all companies are success in e-commerce as they are not able to face the challenges in market by the use of Internet.
One of the top 10 dot-com failures of e-commerce is the Pets.com. Pets.com was a short-lived online business that sold pet accessories and supplies directly to consumers over the World Wide Web. It launched in August of 1998 and went into liquidation in November 6, 2000.
One of the causes of the failure of Pets.com is the insufficient budgets. Developing a website is the beginning expenditure of an e-commerce company. Many companies are under budget in their website maintenance and marketing.
Pets.com made significant investments in infrastructure such as their warehousing. These investments cause Pets.com needed a critical mass of customers to break even, which is to cover the cost to maintain their e-commerce. However, the Pets.com management and board realized that they would not be able to raise further capital after the bursting of the dot-com bubble. They forcefully undertook actions to sell the company.
Moreover, the implementation of ineffective business strategies causes the failure of Pets.com in e-commerce too. The company had to undercharge for its shipping costs to attract their customers, which were actually making loss on most of the items they sold.
Besides, the inadequate order fulfillment is one of the causes of failure of Pets.com. Pets.com was never able to give pet owners a persuasive reason to buy supplies online. For example, after customers ordered kitty litter, they had to wait few days to actually get it. If a company does not have stock on hand or readily available to meet customer orders, it will make the customer annoying and lost their trust to the company’s services and product.
Because of these causes, Pets.com went into liquidation in November of 2000. Therefore, in order to avoid the failure of an e-commerce company, strong organizational and effective team management strategies, effective customer relation policies and meeting the demands of its valuable customers are the key elements of the successfulness in e-commerce.

Identify and Compare the Revenue Model for Google, Amazon.com and eBay.

Google, Amazon.com and eBay are three famous examples of e-commerce success companies. Each of these companies has different types of revenue models that generate huge profits throughout the years. Every revenue model that each company using has its very own special characteristics and features that helps in maintaining the company’s specialty and successfulness.

Google Inc is an American public corporation which provides targeted advertising solutions and global Internet search solutions. With the fast pacing internet, people around the world starting build their webmaster skills to earn more revenues all the way through Google’s revenue model which talks precisely about Google AdWords and Google AdSense.

Google AdWords is a pay per click Google’s advertising program where Google generate most of the revenues from this revenue model. Pay per click advertising is an advertising model where advertisers have to pay whenever their advertisements receive a click. Google AdWords, featuring this advertising model, is designed to allow the advertisers to present their advertisements to the Internet users at the moment the users are searching for information connected to what the advertisers are providing.

Google AdSense is an advertising serving program where the website owners can enable text, image as well as video advertisements on their sites through this program. These ads are administered by Google and the revenue is generated on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis.

Amazon.com, Inc is an American e-commerce company and it was one of the first major companies to sell goods through the Web. Amazon was begun as an online bookstore which could offer more titles than the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores. Since 2000, Amazon’s logotype is become an arrow leading from A to Z, symbolizing the aspiration of the company to sell more variety products.

Amazon now has steadily enrolled into different area of retail sales, from entertainment electronic products, to kitchen item and other household products. The company began to sell its products under its own private label, “Pinzon”, starting from August 2005. This trademark application suggested the company to focus on textiles, kitchen utensils, and other household goods.

In March 2007, Amazon expanded its business to larger and more diverse list of products. The products that the company sold was including items such as paints, carpets, hair accessories, clothing, jewelry and etc. On September 25, 2007, Amazon selling downloads exclusively in MP3 format through its own online music store. In August 2007, Amazon announced AmazonFresh that offering various types of foods. Amazon has now expanded into film production in 2008.

eBay.com is an online auction and shopping Web site in which the Internet users and businesses sell and buy products as well as services all around the world. Millions of collectibles, appliances, computers, furniture, vehicles, and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, and sold daily in eBay.com. Anything can be sold in the site as long as it is not illegal and it does not infringe the eBay Prohibited and Restricted Items policy.

In April 2006, eBay Express had been set up where selected eBay items are mirrored in this site. Buyers can shop in eBay Express using a shopping cart to purchase their desired items from multiple sellers. In June 2006, eBay opened an eBay Community Wiki and eBay Blogs that enable the Internet users to discuss, chat, and ask questions in those sites.

eBay provides several types of auctions. The most common three auctions types are Auction-style listings, and Fixed Price format. Auction-style listings allow the retailer to offer one or more items for sale for a specified number of days whereas Fixed Price format offers the seller to provide one or more items for sale and for those buyers who agree to pay at a particular price, they win the auction without bidding.

The revenue generated by Google is mostly from online advertising, whereas for Amazon, this company generates revenues through online shopping for different kind of range of products. While for eBay, it generates revenue from a number of fees, there are fees to list a product and fees when the product sells, as well as several optional fees. These are all based on various factors and scales. Although each company is using different kinds of revenue models, it cannot be denied that most of these revenue models bring a huge profit for the companies.

The History and Evaluation of E-Commerce

Nowadays, one of the most popular activities that Internet users tend to do on the Web is shopping; this is especially seen in developed countries, as well as developing country. Internet users can shop anytime, anywhere, just with one computer, in the company of network coverage. Anyone can build their pages on the Web to display their specific products and services. This state is known as electronic commerce, which is commonly known as e-commerce.

What is e-commerce? It consists of the buying and selling of specific products and services over the Internet and other computer networks. The history of e-commerce dates back to the creation of the old concept of ‘sell and buy’, with the presence of computer, electricity, cable, modem and the Internet. In 1991, e-commerce was generally become possible when the Internet was released to commercial use.

Originally, e-commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically with the assisting of the leading technologies, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) which were introduced in the late 1970s. These technologies gave a chance for the Internet users to do electronic transactions and to exchange business information. Besides, these technologies allowed sellers and buyers to send commercial documents such as purchase order or invoices electronically. However, EDI has not gained reasonable acceptance because the high cost of EDI prohibited small businesses and medium-sized companies from participating in the electronic.

In 1980s, the development and acceptance of automated teller machine (ATM) and credit cards were also types of e-commerce. Enterprise resource planning system (ERP), data warehousing and data mining were included in the treatment of e-commerce from 1990s onwards. In 1994, the Internet was generally becoming popular among the general public. In 2000, the meaning of e-commerce was changed. An enormous amount of business corporations in the Western Europe and the United States represented their services in the World Wide Web. E-commerce now was being defined as the process buying and selling over the Internet using secure connections and electronic payment services.

Many of the e-commerce companies had been vanished due to the collapsing of dot-com in 2000. However, the online retailers had began to recognize the advantages of e-commerce and they started add such capabilities onto their websites. By the end of 2001, the largest form of e-commerce, Business-to-Business (B2B) model had been recognized and it brought a huge gain to the online retailers.

E-commerce is becoming an integral part in our daily lives at the present and in the near future. It has brought a great deal of advantages to the Internet consumers and retailers by providing a convenient way for people in the process of buying and selling. Moreover, e-commerce is also contributes to the boosting up and growth of the economics of a country by generating more revenues and profits to the country. E-commerce should be used in good way so that it will not be mistakenly used in unhealthy sector.