Opportunities generated by Internet-based e-commerce

Internet commerce can substantially improve productivity by lowering transaction, production and
distribution costs, facilitating market entry, improving customer service, extending geographical coverage
and increasing competition. This should lead to lower prices, improved quality and innovative new products
and services, which should further increase economic growth and welfare. Some of the benefits associated
with commerce over the Internet include (a) better availability of information, (b) global reach, (c) reduced
transaction costs, (d) lower barriers to entry, and (e) new sources of revenue.

(a)Better availability of information: Online commerce enables better access to product and price
information for all involved including buyers and sellers, producers and distributors. Already, searchagent
software allow users to look for the lowest prices around the world. A new breed of
‘infomediaries’ has emerged that base their operations on bringing more complete product information
to customers. Excite Inc. search engines, for instance, offer a comparison-shopping service called Jango
(jango.com), which screens a range of online merchants and brings back the best prices for specific
books, compact discs or other products. Many others offer similar service, such as Hotbot (hotbot.com)
by Wired Ventures. A fast growing auction house that brings buyers and sellers together and claims to
have been profitable from day one is eBay (ebay.com). Compare.net finds products that match the
features and price range that the user has specified. The user can then jump to the indicated site to make
a purchase.

(b) Global reach (production, distribution and customer service): Distance and time become less relevant
as companies are able to reach their business partners across the globe and serve their customers quickly
and around-the-clock. Producers will often be able to choose a place for production and customer
service much independently from the location of their customers. Companies and individuals in low
income countries are able to reach information and get contacts in ways which were difficult earlier—
either due to the nature of voice communication and/or its very high cost.

(c) Reduced transaction costs: Cost reduction has been one of the main motivations for early adoption of
the Internet. E-commerce should also offer improved transaction management thanks to automated
order, payment and logistics processing systems. Cisco Systems reports reducing its expenses by
US$ 500 million thanks to the Internet

(d)  Lower barriers to entry: The capital cost of entry to establish a presence online is low compared to
conventional outlets. The cost of establishing a reputation on the Internet can also be lower than in
traditional established markets. A modest investment in a brilliant idea can eventually lead to good
results. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit from easier market entry. But considering
the amount of unsuccessful business endeavors online, the actual cost of setting up a profitable
business is probably higher than believed. With increasing global competition in electronic business,
many argue that global brands will continue to dominate, while SMEs will have to specialize to niches
in order to compete.

(e)  New source of revenue: In 1998, nearly half of website managers claim that their online businesses are
profitable (46 per cent, up from 30 per cent recorded in the last three years). The highest profits are
reported among retail websites selling directly to consumers—around half of them are profitable today.
Of the websites that generated revenue in 1997, the average was a little over US$ 100’000. About 30 per
cent generated revenues under US$ 1’000 and 25 per cent had revenues between US$ 1’000 and
US$ 10’000. Yet, the reality is that today few companies are making big profits on the Internet. Only
1 per cent of the b-to-b online businesses generated revenues above one million US dollars in the year.
Not even the widely admired Amazon.com, in the Internet book selling business, is expected to be
profitable before 2001.

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Search Engine Optimization And Why You Gotta Use It

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.
But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday. So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating. With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all. So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.
Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme. You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.
You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.
Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding. If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.
Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

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Control You Business With A Good Shopping Cart SystemControl You Business With A Good Shopping Cart System

E-Commerce shopping cart is an essential component of your online business. You must have the best software that provides data security both for your business and customers.
Your software shopping cart should be user-friendly, but reliable. E-commerce stores must assure customers that their payment processing is done with security.
The first tip to consider before buying a website shopping cart is to know which type suits you best. If your business is small and new, the merchant services cart is ideal.
The merchant services cart provides the essential elements. These elements are the hosted shopping cart, gateway and Merchant account, which is actually a bank account. The merchant services cart will maintain your client’s personal information during payment processing.
The e-commerce shopping cart should uphold your customer’s interests and your credibility. With merchant services, you are given an administrative interface to login to your account and add products, shipping options, and prices.
If you process payments of less then $1000, your business is small. It doesn’t need the fully integrated shopping. It needs the hosted shopping cart. Its features are similar to Merchant Services cart in almost all aspects. The only difference is the business name that appears on the customer’s credit card statement.
In Hosted shopping carts, you are allowed to use your own merchant account and gateway. As a result, your business name will appear to your customer’s credit card statement, decreasing your charge backs.
The Fully integrated shopping cart is the most expensive and dynamic e-commerce shopping cart. It offers features that are not available in the other two types of shopping carts.
However, it requires advanced programming skills and can be used with your merchant account or your provider’s shopping cart for payment processing.
If you have advanced programming skills, you can choose the free shopping cart. But even if you do not have excellent programming skills, you can choose a good company to customize a fully integrated shopping cart for you.
Your budget influences your choice of an e-commerce shopping cart. The cost of shopping cart software varies. You can choose between pre-made or customized. The latter is more expensive.
The functionality of your shopping cart is another vital consideration. The three types of shopping carts mentioned earlier have the basic features such as getting orders and handling payment processing.
However, not all can perform tasks such as giving discounts to certain products, showing customer reviews and assigning products to many categories and giving away coupons. Among the three shopping carts mentioned, the fully integrated has these added features.
The payment processing procedure is another important concern when you choose an e-commerce shopping cart. There is a cart that completes the transaction in two web pages. There is another cart that requires three pages to do the same task.
Finally, consider the appearance it presents to your customers. At times, some websites earn the highest profits because of its appearance. Your e-commerce shopping cart should present attractive and neat web pages.

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Useful E Commerce Web Design Tips

E commerce in present era has surfaced as one of the most successful methods to sell products online without having to actually meet a customer and also without having to show a product. Towards achieving the goal of satisfying the needs of the customer while he is on the website is to have a good web design. An ecommerce website should be able to help the customer find his product & easily purchase it.

In this article we are going to look at some vital web design tips which every ecommerce website should have to succeed in this competitive online market.

1. Implement clear & easy site navigation so that customers can find their required product quickly.
2. Make the site attractive by use of flash & other dynamic content but also take steps to keep these features to a limit so that they do not slow down the website.
3. The ecommerce design should provide hassle free shopping & payment functionality so that they return to make other purchases in the future.
4. Create clear navigable categories and sub categories for customers to browse through at the time they visit your website so that they do not get confused and leave the site.
5. Effective search functionality should be implemented in the ecommerce design so that customers have more options to check such as ability to search the most recent or most popular products or based on user ratings. These options help save time for customers and act in a positive way for your website.
6. Product images should be clear and there should be proper product description, feature explanation provided in each of the product pages to help customers understand the use of the product before purchasing it.
7. The web design should also take into consideration seo factors so that the website gets more search engine visibility and is able to attract more visitors. Some such techniques among others would be like adding proper ALT tags for product images, reducing image & page load times.

Nowadays everyone likes to shop online as it save them time which is spent on going to a physical store and also gives him more options to select from. So as an e commerce store owner if you also want to succeed then it is quite necessary to keep note of the above mentioned factors and design the site accordingly to reap the benefits.

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International Investment And World Trade

Currently, there is an estimated 40,000 multinational corporation’s world wide in and approximately 250,000 overseas collaborations running cross-continental operations. Globalization has allowed access to markets via technology and has reduced distribution, lower internal coordination costs. It has also allowed for networking of specialized services and products in support of corporate functions through business process outsourcings (BPO’s) whether within the companies’ internal operations or its external activities. With the current communications and management technologies available, more companies are able to make the most out of international trade liberalization. Today, multinational corporations are expanding themselves to increase their markets, increase brand presence and image and benefit from inexpensive raw materials and labor. As mentioned, the major reason for multinational expansion is accessing a wider market. Though there has been some setbacks because of international financial crises and recession, trends in Asia, particularly China and India, have been able to sustain interests. Among the developments that are being considered as return of Coca-Cola to India, the ranking of Asia as the most attractive foreign direct investment region and the growing success on BPO’s in India and the Philippines. The opening up of the banking industry in China December 2006 is a good example of this motivation. It has been one of the most anticipated developments in the global market. The sheer size of the Chinese market remains to be the greatest attraction to most prospective new entrants. Other benefits for companies include reduced labor, materials or overall operation costs. A significant benefit of going global is establishing brand and product presence. Many companies have also benefited from the market variation that globalization has provided them increasing product efficiency and marketability.

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Importance of E-commerce Today

E-commerce is generally associated with buying and selling over the Internet, or conducting any form of transaction involving the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods or services through a computer-mediated network. Although is it a popular, this definition is not comprehensive enough to capture recent developments in this new and revolutionary business phenomenon. More popular and complete definition is: E-commerce is the use of electronic communications and digital information processing technology in business transactions to create, transform, and redefine relationships for value creation between or among organizations, and between organizations and individuals.
International Data Corp estimates the value of it by 2000 at US$350.38 billion. This is projected to reach to as high as US$3.14 trillion by 2004. IDC also predicts an increase for the Asian’s percentage share in worldwide e-commerce revenue from 5% in 2000 to 10% in 2004. While some people use e-commerce and e-business interchangeably, they have distinct concepts about that. Information and communications technology is used in e-commerce in inter-business or inter-organizational transactions and in business-to-consumer transactions.
On the other hand, in e-business, ICT is used to enhance one’s business. It includes any types of process that a business organization conducts over a computer-mediated network. A more popular definition of e-business is: The transformation of an organization’s processes to deliver additional customer value through the application of technologies, philosophies and computing paradigm of the new economy. There are three primary processes are enhanced in e-business.
1. Production processes: It is a process which include procurement, ordering and replenishment of stocks; processing of payments; electronic links with suppliers; and production control processes, among others.
2. Customer-focused processes: this process includes promotional and marketing efforts, selling over the Internet, processing of customers’ purchase orders and payments, and customer support, among others. And

3. Internal management processes: this is a process in which include employee services, training, internal information-sharing, video-conferencing, and recruiting. Electronic applications increase information flow between production and sales forces to improve sales force productivity. Workgroup communications and electronic publishing as internal business information are likewise made more efficient.

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E-Commerce in a Nutshell

What is the use of paying hundreds of dollars per week on rent just to sell a few products through a storefront when you can sell everything easily and efficiently online? That is the question a lot of potential small business owners are asking themselves whilst they piece together the intricate details of their business plan. An e-commerce driven online store can prove to be a much more effective and profitable means of selling your products or services to the public. E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web. In practice, this term and a newer term, e-business, are often used interchangeably. The beauty of e-commerce, similar to a number of Internet-based technologies, is that it allows new or existing small business owners to sell their unique product or service to the masses without requiring a large sum of capital in order to get the ball rolling. This, in itself, has proven to be the key factor in popularising e-commerce to the level it is today.The cost differences between opening an online store to a real storefront are alarmingly huge. The fact is that you can easily open an online store for approximately two thousand dollars whereas opening a physical storefront will incur costs for rent, fitting out, signage, product displays and much, much more. As small business owners, we are daunted by the fact of having to spend large sums of money that, in most cases, we don’t have. An online store gives us the ability to unleash our products/services to the public without burning a hole in our back pocket.E-commerce has a number of uses and these extend much further than just having an online store. Various businesses use e-commerce as a means of accepting donations, site registrations, project progress payments, bill payments, receiving payments for online games, purchasing goods on eBay and more. Think of it this way, whenever a financial transaction takes place via the Internet, you can thank e-commerce and its accompanying technologies.So, can you trust e-commerce given that there are hackers and malicious viruses around? The simple answer is yes, you can. Although a lot of movies, television shows and other forms of media depict e-commerce as being an insecure method of payment, the truth of the matter is that they are all wrong. Online stores and other online service providers use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificates to encrypt any data that is transferred between your computer and the remote host thus ensuring a secure connection while your transaction takes place. E-commerce is a secure method of payment and can work in favour for both store owners and shoppers alike. It all comes down to the end user. By ensuring your operating system and antivirus software is up to date, you can rest assured that your online shopping experience will be a happy one.If you are in the process of starting your own business and are interested in selling goods or services, it would be in your interests to consider opening an online store before jumping the gun and renting a large store within a shopping centre. The costs differences between the two are staggering and the savings you can make are even higher. Never underestimate the power of the World Wide Web. Many business owners are currently utilising this technology and are making a killing in the process. You too can join them.

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