Used Names For Ebusiness example essay topic

There is no universally accepted definition of eBusiness. It embraces all aspects of buying and selling products and services over a network. The essential characteristics of eBusiness are that the dealings between two parties, be it business to consumer or business to business, are online transactions, and that the key commodity being traded is information. In effect, we see eBusiness as the gateway to a deal - it is a transaction that may, but doesn't necessarily have to, lead to the delivery of a physical product.

There are several commonly used names for eBusiness, the most popular being eCommerce and eTrade. Some of the more academic treatises attempt to distinguish the terms (for instance, eCommerce is sometimes limited to the buying and selling of goods and the flows of associated information and funds; eTrade can be viewed as covering only supplier to supplier transactions). Whichever term is used there is a clear differentiation between the 'e' and the 'business', 'commerce' or 'trading'. The former is a question of technical capability, the latter the way in which that capability is applied. Put them together and you end up with something more than the sum of their combined parts.

New possibilities and requirements emerge. Therefore, the focus of the emerging world of eBusiness will be on: Technical aspects-the hardware, software and networks that are needed to connect a community of interest and allow them to share information. This also covers the design and presentation of that information. An important part of eBusiness technology is the specialised software used for payments (billing, charging, invoicing, account management), security (authorisation, authentication, privacy, data integrity and audit) and service support (problem management, configuration control and order handling). Business model - how businesses interwork, and how this influences the way in which they are established and the way in which technology is deployed. In this respect, we examine the typical flow of orders, fulfilment and payments, how various players co-operate to provide an end product or service to the consumer, and the various ways in which a virtual market is established.

The diagram above gives some idea of how the key elements fit together. It should be said that the perspective is intended to be general, and should fit business-to-business trade as well as the case where individual consumers interact with an online business. So you can 'daisy chain' the picture, such that someone who takes the role of supplier to one set of customers may also take the role of customer to a different supplier further back in the chain. In any case, they all have to be on a shared network, work from the same catalogue, have some means of delivering goods, and be able to settle up after the transaction. The Whistle-Stop Tours far, eBusiness has been described in broad terms as a mass-market capability that is enabled by a combination of the Internet's global reach and the vast resources of traditional Information Technology (IT). Given this, it should come as no surprise that it is a multi-faceted beast (or, potentially, a many-headed monster!

). Many of those facets are technical, but others are not. To get a grasp on the overall scope and nature of the eBusiness proposition, this section looks at the constituent parts of trading over a network. The marketplace Before we think about business, we should first think about the market where that business is conducted. So, what is an electronic market? It can be viewed as a direct parallel of the familiar shop, store or emporium.

It is, in essence, a virtual trading area where deals are struck over a network. The 'shop-front' is the computer and the server is the warehouse. In fact, there is an electronic analogue of virtually all of the items you'd find in a conventional market-including bogus traders, inferior goods and dubious bargains. E Shops The electronic shop can be thought of as the 'look and feel' of the screen that fronts the customer. Just as with high street stores, the aim is to entice the customer to browse and, ultimately, to buy.

Although unlikely to supplant real-world shops, the online variety can provide features that seem likely to promote their growth. As well as being readily available and easy to search, they can provide some measure of mass customisation. For instance, the made-to-measure shirtmaker, Charles Tyrwhitt has an online shop that can apply a buyer's previously entered measurements and preferences as it mails each order from the Jermyn Street shop. Every customer is thus treated as an individual, but there is capacity (at least on the customer handling side) to cater for a mass market. The fundamental prerequisite for presenting products and services online in the eBusiness world is the catalogue. These are central, and are the electronic equivalent of a shop's shelves, goods, special offers and departments.

The catalogue is the online representation of what is 'for sale' (or more correctly, what is available for trading). It is important to appreciate that there are different scales of catalogue. They range from a set of web pages and a simple script that allows orders to be taken, through mid-range catalogue products that are characterised by a pre-defined structure of product categories and sub-categories, up to large scale corporate catalogues that are customisable. In this last case, there is usually back end integration with inventory, stock control and ordering systems.

Another important point about catalogues is that they are different for buyers and for sellers. The former is a virtual directory that allows the buyer to look at and judge a range of competing products from a number of different suppliers. The latter is a structured set of information that represents what a particular supplier has to sell. The technology used to represent these different types of catalogue has to match-that is, it either has to be optimised for one seller and multiple buyers, or vice versa. One further differentiation in catalogues that should be made is that of business-to-business as opposed to business-to-consumer.

The consumer-oriented catalogues tend to be stronger on presentation, as they usually have to sell on the basis of eye-appeal. The business catalogues are more focused on quick access to another business' needs, and these tend to be high volume and fairly routine. For instance, many supermarkets issue stock replenishment orders from their automated stock control systems-they buy a lot of carrots on a regular basis! In short, the distinction between consumer- and business-oriented catalogues is akin to food mart against delicatessen. Payment So to the core of any business (and eBusiness is no exception) - profit. Trade, commerce and business only exist to satisfy the needs and desires of the participants.

This means one party getting something they want in exchange for something the other party wants; and usually it is money that fuels the desire to trade. By its very nature, eBusiness needs to emulate in some way the customary direct exchange of cash for goods. Attitudes to the use of different payment mechanisms are changing (and vary when considering Europe, the US, Asia-Pacific or the whole world). A priority in establishing an eBusiness is to put in place an acceptable mechanism for payment. There are many technical options, and to choose appropriately, factors such as scale and acceptability all need to be carefully examined. By way of illustration, there are various scales of payment to be considered: Items such as books are regularly purchased electronically (e.g. through Amazon. com), and it is common for a single customer to buy a single book and pay with a single credit card transaction (probably in the?

20 + range). However, the cost of processing credit card transactions is quite high, and may not be economical for the purchase of small-value items such as consumer reports or individual music tracks, which would typically be in the? 1-lO range. Technologies exist for handling these small-value payments (known as 'micropayments'), and lumping them together into single credit card transactions. The range below? 1 is often referred to as the area of 'nanopayments'.

Such payments may represent, for example, the price of viewing an individual Internet page of information (e.g. a particular share price). Not only are different technologies required to aggregate these various categories of small-scale payments, but also the eBusiness will need to put in place different strategies for such things as handling account queries and dealing with bad debts. For instance, a sensible way of dealing with lost nanopayments would be to write off the debts, and blacklist the offenders The cost of recovering the debt would be too high. Settlement It is all very well taking a 'virtual' payment for goods or services offered over the Internet but, at some point, this must be converted into dollar bills, Euros, or some other tangible form of money. Hence, we need a gateway between the virtual world and the real world-a payments gateway.

This can be effected with automated connection to Merchant acquirers (e.g. Barclays Merchant Services), the BACS system, direct debits, or other systems, such as PC-EFT, WorldPay and Clear Commerce. Of course, traditional settlements are not mandatory. In the past, people have used all kinds of different objects to represent money: leaves, sticks, beads and even bits of metal or pieces of printed paper! In the electronic world there are additional possibilities, such as token-based systems, where you first buy a number of tokens, in your chosen currency, and are then free to spend them on goods which are priced in tokens.

An example of this is web 'beanz' which are rather like on-line loyalty card points. Electronic wallets and smart cards such as Monde x provide another alternative. Some of these types of electronic cash are fully portable, whereas others retain your wallet on your PC or on a server. Presentation As with catalogues, the way in which online products and services are presented depends upon the market.

For the electronic shop, the art of window dressing is not really one that has transferred online as yet. Already the ease of use of online systems is coming under the scrutiny of consumer watchdogs such as Which? Magazine, who report a significant impact (both positive and negative) of presentation quality. When there are many suppliers (and this is worldwide), the look and feel of the shop will make a big difference, as will the ease of use. In much the same vein, business-to-business transactions will need to be reliable and easy to use, in their own way. The design of online information is very much in its infancy, but there are some basic guidelines for getting the right presence and operation for the job in hand (and one of the best ways to see what you should do right is to look at other people's mistakes).

Navigational dead-ends, inconsistent and out-of-date information, lack of an overall information map, frustrating and non-intuitive structures and poor search / browse capabilities all put customers off. The electronic window dresser is one of a number of new skills being driven by eBusiness. One of the interesting twists to presenting what you have to offer online is that it is possible to find out exactly what each customer has looked at, what they purchased and when. This would consume a huge amount of time and video to do in a conventional shop, but consists of little more than analysing system logs for an eBusiness. Information about individual customers, their browsing and buying patterns, is an important piece of feedback on how to go about presenting your goods. Security In the 'real' world you go into a shop (about which you can make some judgement from its location, size, type of premises, how long it has been there, and so on), and you hand over cash in return for goods which you carry away.

The risks are very small, and even if things do go wrong, you can usually exchange the faulty goods. You know where to go back to (bricks and mortar rarely move overnight) and who to talk to. If you dont get satisfaction you can even, as a last resort, make a scene: Standing in the middle of a busy store, telling an assistant, as loudly as you are able, how badly you have been treated, can elicit rapid solutions to your problems. When trading over the Internet, things are not so simple: the dream of the virtual trader can suddenly become a nightmare. For example, how do consumers know (before they hand over their credit card details) that the company they are dealing with is reputable, and is what it purports to be? Conversely, how does the trader know that the consumer is not using stolen credit card details?

Furthermore, how do both parties ensure that their transaction takes place privately without someone else snooping on it or, even worse, tinkering with the transaction details while they are in transit across the network? And when things go wrong (as they inevitably do), what sorts of mechanism are there to ensure that both parties fulfil their obligations? Secret codes have long been used to ensure the privacy of information that must be sent by untrusted carriers (or public networks): in 1660, Samuel Pepys was certainly devising such codes for use by English aristocrats communicating with the exiled King Charles. In eBusiness, the principle is the same, although the codes (or cryptography) need to be a lot stronger because the potential eavesdroppers are sophisticated, and are assumed to have access to powerful computers and software. There are many ways of establishing a secure communications link.

Basically, for two people to be able to communicate using a code, they must 'share a secret' (the key to the code), and this secret must be denied to everyone else. Pepys must have had the same problem: how to agree with the King and his supporters in Holland what code would be used for communications from England. The same problem exists for today's cryptographers: how do a trader and a consumer (who will probably never meet) agree on a secret code that cannot be guessed by anyone else? The answer is to use a type of coding which employs a so-called 'asymmetric code'. This is one in which the message is encoded using one key and decoded using a different key.

In this instance, getting a copy of the encoding key (the so-called 'public' key) does not allow you to decode the message for that you need the other, 'private', key. Even if a link is secure, you need to know that it is the one you wanted. So, when you access an Internet site that calls itself First National Bank, you want to be sure that it is truly what it purports to be before you engage in a financial transaction with it. The way this is done is to have the site certified by a 'trusted third party', who checks the authenticity of the site and provides certified copies of that site's 'public key' for communicating securely.

There are a number of types of certificates that are issued by such trusted third parties, each with its own level of trustworthiness and area of application. Finally, what happens if something goes wrong? There has to be some means of checking who promised what to whom, and when. The concept of non - repudiation (proving that a deal was struck) is one that needs to be transferred into the world of eBusiness. This is where verifiable transaction records and digital signatures fit. A successful eBusiness should consider and have viable policies, approaches and solutions to all of the above issues.

In addition, there is the small but important practicality that a certain amount of infrastructure has to be established before you can actually begin to trade online. One point that will become clear is that there is a lot more to eBusiness than shopping. It may be true that, to most people, the whole idea of eBusiness is new and trendy, an exciting opportunity brought about by the convergence of IT and the Internet. However, this is only half the eBusiness story. The other half concerns the supply chain and how traders are supplied with the goods and services that they need to operate.

In the US, the term 'Maintenance, Repair and Operations' (MRO) has come to be used to describe the main commodity products used by a large company; and this side of eBusiness has been going on for some years. The established mechanism for inter-company transactions is known as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). There are established standards (called the EDl fact standards), and an established body of know-how in how to link to the fulfilment, inventory and other back-end systems that make it possible to automate the end-to-end eBusiness process, from ordering through to delivery. The 'behind the scenes' aspects are an important part of the overall picture..