As we all know Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) is basically a buying and selling of products and services as well as transferring funds and exchanging data using the internet. The transactions can be availed in the terms of business-business (B2B), consumer-to-business, and consumer to consumer.

For example:

If you purchase a product from amazon or other shopping application then that will be a classic sample of an e-commerce transaction. Here interacting with the seller (ie Amazon), exchanging data in pictures, text, address forms for delivery, and then end up with the payment.

Still, now, e-commerce is the vital developing organizations in the global economy. As per statistics, it increases by nearly 23% year by year. And the outcome is to be a $27 trillion organization by the end of this century.

Pros and Cons of E-commerce

Pros

• It gives a better reach of products to the seller and destroyed the barrier between the seller and buyer. Now, there is the virtual world without the burden of location.
• It will significantly lower the cost during the transaction and removes fixed costs which makes companies get and enjoy a much higher profit.
• Delivery of goods is fast with less effort and it is time consumption as well as energy saving. Customer queries are also addressed as soon as possible.
• 24×7 service is available and it doesn’t have closing hours like shop as it is functioning all the time.
• There is no mediator between customer and seller which allows quick understanding.

Cons:

• The start-up cost is very high. The hardware and software setup and the training cost of employees are quite costly.
• Even today some of the e-commerce industry leads to high-risk failure.
• Lack of interpersonal relationship which is very significant for many brands and products. This kind of problem arises for many types of services and products such as jewelry or any other interior designing business.
• Security is another important concern. The customer data was stolen and credit card, identity theft, etc.
• And also the customer fulfillment issues like shipping, delivery, correct specification of the products, etc. This leaves the customer dissatisfied.

E-commerce types

There are four basic types of the e-commerce business. They are as follows,

• Business to Business

Here the companies are doing business to business transactions with each other. Finally, the consumer is not involved. So, online transactions only connect with manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers, etc.

• Business to Consumer

Here the company sells its products directly with the consumer. The consumer will surf their websites and select the products, read reviews, and place orders. The company sends the products to the specified consumer address. Popular examples are Jabong, Amazon, Flipkart, etc.

• Consumer to consumer
  

Here only the consumers are in direct connection with each other. No company is involved. It supports people selling their goods and assets such as cars, bikes, electronics, etc. Popular examples are OLX, Quikr, etc.

• Consumer to business

Here the consumer provides a good or service to the organization. The IT freelancer who sells his/her software or any kind of formatted project to the company. Popular examples are Fiverr and up to work.

E-commerce and its Value Chain 

Typical business organizations design, generate, market, deliver, and support its goods and services. Each of this process creates cost and value to the goods/services that is evenly distributed to the customer. The proper activities will be taking part in each phase of the process which adds value to the business.

Further,the primary activities that outcome in final goods/services in this process should be included:

• Handling organizational infrastructure
• Handling human resources
• Achieving various inputs for each activity
• Growing technology to the business active as well as competitive

Voice-Based E-Commerce 

In recent days, just using mobile and accessing a web site you can place products. The center of these new services is voice recognition and word-to-speech technologies that have greatly evolved over the past few years.

Customers can speak and can identify the command and respond with the voice words. This will be used to search the database buy product names and detect the merchant with most competitive prices.

One method to implement voice-based e-commerce is to use digital wallets online. Furthermore, financial information these wallets have other related information like customer address, billing data, license, and so on are transmitted through online. Here the digital wallets are created using the customer’s PCs and supported for voice-based e-commerce transactions.

Security features like voice recognition are used so that authentication matches specific voice and also call recognition so that calls have been located from particular mobile devices for voice-based e-commerce.

The applications that support voice-based e-commerce are:

• Getting sports scores
• Identifying directions to a new restaurant
• Tickets for movies
• Buying a book.

The popular websites in the market are InternetSpeech.com, BeVocal.com, and Tellme.com.

Comparison of Traditional and E-commerce 

In e-commerce, there may not be any physical grocery and most buyers and sellers don’t see each other. The web and telecommunication technologies play a vital role in e-commerce. Although the achievements and objectives of both e-commerce and traditional commerce are the same selling products and services to generate a profit they do it quite differently.

• Traditional commerce showcases information using magazines, flyers. In another way, e-commerce by e-mail, online catalogs, and websites.
• Traditional commerce interacted by phone and checks product availability through phone, fax, and letters.Yet e-commerce by email and internal networks.
• Traditional commerce generates orders and invoices in printed forms while e-commerce by mails and websites.
• Traditional commerce receives product acknowledgments through phone and fax while e-commerce gets by mails, websites, and Electronic data interchange (EDI).

Currently, many companies operate with a mix of traditional and e-commerce. All medium and large organizations contain some kind of e-commerce availability. Some of the organizations are Wal-Mart stores, Vatan computer, GoldPC, and Toy-R-us.

Electronic Data Exchange: 

As EDI is a well-defined and efficient technology. This outcomes many advantage such as decreased rate and consumer service. Organizations can get benefit from exchanging information electronically with the help of connecting computers and data communications into process.

It supports to decreases paper work, increase productivity, minimize costs, improves accuracy and response time. There are two main formats for EDI conventions during transmission of business documents such as ANSI X.12 which is mainly utilized in North America and UN/EDIFACT is utilized worldwide.

EDI technology has the same age of internet. The two technologies have started to connect and resulted in EDI and the internet is accessible universally.