Page 10 - DCAP306_DCAP511_E-COMMERCE_AND_E-BUSINESS

Unit 1: Introduction to E-Commerce and E-Business

businesses. Later, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was introduced to electronically transfer
documents which extended electronic transfers from financial transactions to other types of transaction
processing.
E-Commerce of today started with the launch of the World Wide Web (WWW) and browsers in the
early 1990s. The relaxation of government restrictions in the telecommunications sector and innovations
have helped in the rapid growth of e-commerce. As a result, the barriers to enter and engage in e-
commerce have fallen rapidly. The important milestones in the evolution of e-commerce are:
1. Internet/APRAnet emerged in 1969
2. WWW and HTML were invented at CERN in 1989

3. NSF increased the restrictions on commercial use of the Internet in 1991
4. Mosaic browser was invented at the University of Illinois and released to the public in 1993
5. Netscape released the Navigator browser in 1994
6. Dell, Cisco, Amazon.com and others began to use the Internet aggressively for commercial
transactions in 1995

Search on Web and prepare a report on the latest developments in e-commerce and e-
Business which occurred after the year 2000.

1.1.2 Factors Fueling E-Commerce
The three major factors fueling e-commerce are economic factors, marketing and customer interaction
factors, and technology factors particularly multimedia convergence.
1. Economic Factors: Economic efficiency is one of the most apparent benefits of e-commerce. It can
be achieved by decreasing communications costs, faster and more economic electronic transactions
with suppliers, lower global information sharing and advertising costs, and cheaper customer
service alternatives.
Economic integration can be either internal or external:
(a) Internal integration pertains to the electronic communication between various departments,
and the networking of business operations and processes within an organization. It helps to
store critical business information in digital form that can be recovered immediately and
transmitted electronically. A corporate intranet is the best example of internal integration.
(b) External integration is the electronic communication between corporations, suppliers,
customers or clients, and contractors in a virtual networking environment with the Internet as
medium.

Did you know? Procter and Gamble, IBM, Nestlé, and Intel are some of the companies with corporate
intranets.
2. Market and Customer Interaction Factors: Organizations are encouraged to use e-commerce in
product promotion and marketing to capture international markets. Similarly, the Internet is used
as a medium for improving customer service and support. The Internet also helps companies to
provide their target consumers with more detailed product and service information.

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