Page 154 - DCAP306_DCAP511_E-COMMERCE_AND_E-BUSINESS

Unit 12: Management of Change

According to eBay (2010), “There are around 2,471 e-commerce hubs in India and states like Andhra
Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Gujarat are the most active areas in terms of online trading.”

B2B transactions will symbolize the largest revenue but online retailing will also see drastic growth.
Online businesses like, travel, entertainment, financial services, and groceries are all expected to grow.
For developing countries like India, e-commerce offers significant opportunity. E-Commerce in India is
still in a blossoming stage, but even the most-pessimistic projections indicate a boom. It is foreseen that
the low cost of personal computers, a growing use of the Internet and an increasingly competitive
Internet Service Provider (ISP) market will facilitate e-commerce growth in India.

Did you know? Among the Asian nations, the growth of e-commerce between 1997 and 2003 was
highest in India.
A successful e-commerce transaction needs both the payment and delivery services to be competent.
There has been a steep rise in the number of companies implementing e-commerce in the recent past.
Most of the Indian portals have also shifted towards e-commerce instead of depending on advertising
revenue.
Various sites are now selling a diverse range of products and services.

Electronic gadgets, greeting cards, flowers, computers, movie tickets to groceries,
and so on.

The time for true e-commerce in India has finally arrived with the stock exchanges coming online. There
are several challenges faced by e-commerce sites in India. This is mostly because of the relatively small
credit card population and lack of standardized credit agencies. Delivery of goods to consumer by
couriers and postal services is not very consistent in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas.
Many Indian banks have set up the Internet banking facilities in place for the advancing e-commerce
market. There has been a tremendous improvement in the speed post and courier system in recent
years. Modern computer technology like Secured Socket Layer (SSL) helps to guard against payment
fraud and to share information with suppliers and business partners. It is expected that India will soon
become a major player in the e-commerce market with additional improvement in the payment and
delivery system.
In this age, many companies and organizations in India have started to take advantage of the prospects
of e-commerce. However, critical challenges are still there which we need to overcome before e-
commerce can become an asset for common people.

The Indian middle class population is equal to the entire U.S. consumer base. This makes
India a genuinely attractive market for e-commerce.

12..2.1 EDI in India

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has changed the way enterprises conduct business across the globe. It
has facilitated easy access of documents, thereby reducing paperwork. EDI reduces errors in
transcription, reduces inventory requirements, and facilitates faster response time for procurement and
customer needs.
Today’s businesses depend on efficient information exchange in the form of paper documents such as
purchase orders, spreadsheets, and so on. The process of exchanging these documents can be quite
inconvenient if they are on paper. This is where EDI technology facilitates the electronic exchange of
business documents. EDI based solutions require minimal human intervention as most processes are
automated.

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