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eCommerce
Introduction
eCommerce has
revolutionized global trade and can be generally defined as:
1. The buying and
selling of goods and services over the Internet
2. The transfer of funds through the Internet
1994 is considered the
birth of mainstream eCommerce. In this year entrepreneur Jeff Bezos started
Amazon.com out of his garage. Since then, businesses from every industry, large
and small, have scrambled to get online.
Projections from
technology research company Forrester (www.forrester.com)
indicate that, by 2006, total online sales will increase to more than $560
billion dollars a year.
But as big and as
impressive such figures are, sometimes it's hard to grasp how these statistics
impact our lives on a day-to-day basis. To get a more revealing picture, we need
to examine consumer spending patterns (i.e. what people do in the real world).
For example, according
to recent statistics from www.itfacts.biz:
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76% of all car
buyers with Internet access researched their car online before buying.
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74% of men and
women with Internet access research all major products online before
purchasing.
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70% of consumers
with Internet access booked their flights online (versus 25% who booked by
telephone).
And this is just a
small piece of the pie!
In addition to the
buying and selling of goods over the Internet, the following activities also
come under the umbrella of eCommerce:
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Business-to-business (B2B) transactions (e.g. when a retailer purchases
stock electronically from a wholesale supplier).
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Individual
share-traders and financial institutions that use the Internet to buy and
sell shares.
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Consumers and
businesses that pay their bills online.
As well as benefiting
large companies, the good news is that eCommerce has allowed thousands of small
businesses to flourish.
According to recent
research by payment processor PayPal, of the small businesses that currently
sell online:
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64% said that the
Internet has increased their revenues or sales
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48% felt that the
Internet helped expand their geographic reach
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73% saved money by
decreasing administrative costs.
Want to collect your
piece of the eCommerce pie?
There are three steps
in the process:
1.
Getting Your Products Online
2.
Securing Your Website
Accepting Payments.
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