Building a business case for your ecommerce website

Building the Business Case

Just as with a business-to -business solution, a business case must be built before  embarking on an implementation for your ecommerce website, which means:

• understanding your objectives;
• understanding the business model;
• balancing costs against profits.

In assessing the cost-effectiveness of a business-to-c it is useful to make the distinction between:

• existing businesses taking advantage of the web;
• small-time entrepreneurs seeing an sales opportunity and setting up a small shop front;
• and new Internet start-up companies with innovative ideas.

History of Ecommerce part 04

Identifying the Business Potential

The developments in communications and standardisation over the past 20 years will undoubtedly continue, and will lead to improvements in the ways industry trades. We now have a range of communications options: telephone networks. ISDN, X.-IOO, the Internet, satellite and mobile communications, and others, such as digital radio, will doubtless become popular. What is important, is how these options are used.

Ii is vital from outsite for any organisation looking to move into E-commerce. particularly business-to-consumer. to clearly understand whether the products and services they offer are suitable for st-Ling online. Some general guidance on the potential for E-commerce can be gauged by asking the following questions:

History of Ecommerce part 03

Slower than Expected Growth

By the end of the 1980s there were high expectations for EDI, and analysts repeatedly made predictions of unprecedented growth. It was widely agreed that only one per cent of potential users had implemented EDI and the number of users was predicted to double every year. It was said that no-one could stay in business without EDI.

History of Ecommerce part 02

The Emergence of Standards

An enormous amount of work has been done behind the scenes to ensure there is compatibility between different systems so that they can be linked to each other (either directly or via a communications network) in order to exchange data. This work has been carried out on a whole range of levels, right from the mechanics of putting the cables and wires together to providing standard applications interfaces in software packages- This standardisation process is called Open Systems Integration (OSI) - which is not to be confused with the ISO (International Standards Organisation) which ratifies these standards.

Internet Pointer

More information on the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and other world standards can be found at http://www.iso.ch/ and http://www.wssn.net/
Most of the results of this work are invisible to companies using computers. Nowadays you can be fairly sure in purchasing hardware that there is a high level of compatibility with other systems. This is not always the case with software products, although popular products have spawned de facto standards that are now being used widely. Examples include Word, the word processing program from Microsoft which has been adopted to such a wide degree by both business and home computer users that it is now acknowledged as a de facto standard.

History of Ecommerce part 01

A Brief History of E-commerce

In year 2012, no one is a stranger to the concept of ecommerce. It has become a part of our normal life. But it was not so mundane and ubiquitous like papers and running waters even 10-15 years ago. I just want to go through a brief history of e-commerce and its rising into the current state.

E-commerce is about using data for commercial purposes by transmitting the data electronically between computer systems in a standard format. But what are the key drivers that triggered the major growth that we saw in E-commerce systems and applications within the last two decades? Well over the past 30 years computer hardware has become cheaper by the month. Operating Systems and. particularly, the software that runs on them, have become more powerful and (arguably) more user-friendly, providing a wider range of solutions to the business market. At the same time, communication options have diversified and improved.
As a result, various industry sectors began to see the potential of linking their computer systems either directly or via communications networks. Once such links were in place, then it was a natural progression to begin exchanging information between trading partners. The requirement for some sort of structure and standardization to these exchanges of business information was recognised, hence the development of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).