The developing of E-commerce

Description

Electronic Commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet.

Some common applications related to electronic commerce are:

• E-mail and messaging
• Documents, spreadsheets, database
• Accounting and finance systems
• Orders and shipment information
• Enterprise and client information reporting
• Domestic and international payment systems
• Newsgroup
• On-line Shopping
• Messaging
• Conferencing

(from wikipedia)

The developing of E-commerce accelerates our ecomomy, changes our way of doing business and lifestyle. Nowadays everything is online, in order to have much more convenient life, people need a way of connecting them online whenever and wherever. But people travel everywhere, it's not that convenient if you carry your laptop everywhere even if there's wireless network everywhere. The better solution is to use a smaller mobile devices, like a mobile phone with internet connection. With those devices, people can also do nearly everything they want. Order tickets for Weekend's movie, check their email with customers, find the status of the goods they ordered, pay their bills with mobile banking.

The developing of E-commerce leads people's need and attitude towards mobile devices. Just because of e-commerce, people have new needs now: they wanna do everything they can with mobile device just as whey do in front of computers. Where there's a need, there's a market, so mobile devices nowadays are designed according to people's new needs. We can say e-commerce actually enriched mobile devices' functions.

Enablers

• The development of technologies

Technologies are developing really fast in recent years, like Internet, 3G, Wireless, .net etc. They're quite mature now. The use of these technologies can strengthen the developing of E-commerce.

• International cooperation

Nowadays, more and more economic organizations are found and playing an important role in the world business. These organizations, together with local governments, did a lot to promote the development of E-commerce.

• The booming multinationals

Because of globalization, there are more and more multinationals in the world. They do business all over the world, most of these companies use international settlement to improve their efficency. The general use of e-commerce in these kind of companies strengthen the developing of e-commerce.

• Low cost

Because of the new settlement methods, a lot of middlemen are cut and result in the save of trasaction fees. Those savings are shared by companies as well as customers, resulting in a lower price. Lower price strengthens the developing of E-commerce again.

Inhibitors

• Privacy and security issues

Although mobile providers keep on saying that they'll try very hard to keep customers' privacy and data security, people still con't trust them 100%. That's the main reason for people's hesitation in using mobile-commerce.

• Wireless bandwidth

Mobile-commerce functions depend on wireless bandwidth. Sometimes people can't use mobile because connection's instability。 But this will change gradually with the coninuous development of wireless internet construction.

• Integration problem

Although mobile devices can visit a lot of websites, there're still a big gap between current business doing online and via mobile. Not all website provide mobile portal. So integration between different systems is one of the problems hindering the development of mobile commerce.

Paradigms

• Before: Transaction was slow, price was high, people wasted a lot of time in communication, negotiation. Middlemen were popular especially in international transaction. Information was asymmetric between different parties.

• After: the whole world becomes a "global village", communication is easier and transaction is faster. People are more efficient in doing business and their life is more convenient than before. Because of the internet, you can find more information online. The world is more transparent.

Timing

• E-commerce milestones:

1. 1990: Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, using a NeXT computer.
2. 1992: J.H. Snider and Terra Ziporyn published Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312063598.
3. 1994: Netscape released the Navigator browser in October under the code name Mozilla. Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its Web page. The first online bank opened. Attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online. Adult materials were also commercially available, as were cars and bikes. Netscape 1.0 in late 1994 introduced SSL encryption that made transactions secure.
4. 1995: Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio started broadcasting. Dell and Cisco began to aggressively use Internet for commercial transactions. eBay was founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.
5. 1998: Electronic postal stamps can be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.
6. 1999: business.com was sold for US $7.5 million, which was purchased in 1997 for US $150,000. The peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster was launched.
7. 2000: The dot-com bust.
8. 2003: Amazon.com had its first year with a full year of profit.

• Mobile phone milestones:

1. The Analog Cellular Age: 1979 The first commercial mobile phone network was opened for business in Tokyo.
2. The Digital Cellular Age: July 1 1991 First GSM network, Radiolinja in Finland was officially opened.
3. The High Speed Cellular Age: October 1, 2001 NTT DoCoMo launched the first commercial WCDMA 3G mobile network.

(see also: wikipedia:E-commerce, 3G mobile history, History of Mobile Phone)

Web Resources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce
• http://www.umtsworld.com/umts/history.htm
• http://ieeemacau.eee.umac.mo/ieee_student/history%20of%20mobile%20phone.htm

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