Applying E-Commerce in business - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages They can also use a variety of platforms to access these services example: mobiles, laptops and desktop computers. This infrastructure contains universal standards and is globally reachable. It is rich in diversity and accommodates videos, audios and text messaging. They enable firms to host live conferences, instant messaging (IM), file transferring and text based live chat across the globe. E-commerce infrastructure enables effective interacting between clients in multi stratums including consumers, producers and vendors. It decreases the cost and increases the quality of business transactions. It allows clients to customize and personalize the services according to the requirements of different parties (Turban, et. al, 2012). E-commerce generates a number of economic benefits to the businesses due to the above characteristics such as decreasing cost, increasing richness in communication, expanding market and enhancing customer relations. The cost of travelling to market place is saved and the physical presence is no longer required for bargaining in virtual markets. Videos, audios, pictures and graphics used in virtual markets can simulate the real shopping experience to buyers. Market of the modern day business has expanded widely across the globe. It is not constrained by country borders, racial, religious, language and ethnicity based differences. It does not involve rigid time zones. Billions of potential consumers and various producers can meet in virtual market places. Consumer becomes a co-participant in marketing process. Hence the products can be customized according to individual preferences unlike in traditional marketing methods (Turban, et. al, 2012). It can be converged with contemporary trends in Information Technologies such as cloud computing. Benefits of Cloud computing for E-Commerce Based on the predicting analyses by Nelson (2010) it is forecasted that 80% proportion of total E-commerce in the world will be taken over by cloud computing within 10 years. Processing of payments using the internet and the webs involve identification of transaction ID, customer name, dollar amount, date/time of transaction and status of the payment. All these can be converged in “cloud” infrastructure at a comparatively lower cost and a higher efficiency (Knowledge Center, 2011). Hence cloud computing depicts the potential growth of E-commerce as well. According to the definition of Mell, and Grance (2011), “cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (p.2). The above definition contains a number of characteristics of E-commerce infrastructure. Economic characteristics of cloud computing are as follows. On-demand self-service involves utility based access to the cloud without involving of human component for providing the service each time a customer needs it. Broad network provides heterogeneous platforms. Resource pooling allows aggregating the storage, memory, processing capacity and network bandwidth of idle computers across the globe and a number of customers who are unaware of the specific location where the service is provided from. Rapid elasticity involves immediately and unlimitedly providing the services while ensuring its availability, accessibility and ...Download file to see next pages Read More