E-Commerce Applications

Organizations today have to constantly reduce costs, introduce new and innovative products, and satisfy increasing customer demands. Customers are demanding lower prices, more product options and custornization, improved level of services and personalized treatment. To a great extent, the Internet has helped organizations cope with these demands. For instance, the physical transfer of business documents and face to face interaction by the sales force with the clients has declined significantly due to the Internet thus helping organizations reduce costs and offer personalized services. Organizations are increasingly using e mails, chat and other online tools as well as mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones to conduct business.

The first phase of E-Commerce evolution, which began in the mid and late 1990s, focused on transaction oriented e commerce rather than E-Commerce. In other words, it focused only on online trading of goods and services. During this phase, dotcom companies focused on having better search, graphical product display and payment processing capabilities. But when the dotcom bubble burst, things changed. In the second phase of E-Commerce evolution, companies shifted their focus from transaction oriented e commerce to customer centric E-Commerce. This marked the second phase of E-Commerce evolution.

During the dotcom boom phase (the first phase), most organizations viewed ebusiness merely as the development of a website for offering information about the company and its products. In some cases, organizations used their websites as just another marketing and sales channel. However, E-Commerce has a much broader scope. It involves the digitization of an organization's internal business processes as well as its external interfaces with customers, suppliers and partners. E-Commerce is about transforming an organization for the information age, where value is created by effectively managing intangible assets rather than just physical assets. It offers significant potential to transform companies, by creating new value chains and business processes or redesigning existing ones.

Organizations are now adopting E-Commerce to improve employee productivity, maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty, and increase revenues and profitability. The customer centric approach is a very important aspect of E-Commerce because:

Service based differentiation is gaining importance over price based competition.
The availability of several technologies for improving customer satisfaction.

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