E-Commerce

Allow everybody in the world the chance to make computer files available to everybody else, and what do you get? You get the Internet. Well, some of us are happy to upload a picture of our cat, or the stunning killer app we wrote....But for others, its a tremendous opportunity to make money. Thus we see amazon.com, selling books, music CDs, and other things, all from a "virtual" store. To every person in the world. Persons of every caste, creed, race, and economic status whatsoever. Well, to all credit-card holders anyway. This is the world of e-commerce.

The tremendous growth of the number of people on the Internet has led to a huge level of participation of business and consumers to handle their commerce electronically. As a result of this new electronic environment, many enterprises-- small and large -- are developing strategies to use these technologies to further their traditional business. In addition, a large number of companies are coming up with innovative business ideas to take advantage of this environment.

E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC, or simply, e-com) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the World Wide Web. Here the parties interact electronically rather than through physical exchanges or direct physical contact. This changes the way different companies look at business. The business can react faster to customer needs and the customer profile itself may change. Further, there is also the possibility of vastly improving the supply-chain management.

Broadly speaking, we can classify e-com into four types, depending on the parties involved in the commerce activities:

business to business

business to consumer

business to administration

consumer to administration

As and when e-commerce really penetrates in the market, different business models are going to emerge. Some of the currently popular e-com businesses are:

E-tailing or the Virtual Storefront and the Virtual Mal

l Market Research

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

E-mail, Fax, and Internet Telephony

Business-to-Business Buying and Selling

Finally, before concluding, we note that a major issue in the success of e-commerce is the problem of security. Security issues include authenticating business users, controlling access to resources such as Web pages for selected users, encryption of communications. In general, ensuring the privacy and effectiveness of transactions is one of the most important things for e-com.

Among the most widely-used security technologies are Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman.