E-commerce
Electronic commerce consists of the buying and selling products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail.
During the peak of the dot com bubble in the late 1990s, many companies were raising vast amounts of money from investors for their online projects. For example, Lastminute.com was founded on the original and attractive idea of catering for people who’d like to do something at the last minute. The project went through several ownership changes and faced heavy criticism.
However, despite all the problems, Lastminute.com still exists and develops, while the great number of other online projects failed. The hype around e-commerce abated. It turned out that people are too often frustrated of using e-commerce sites. They experience technical difficulties, they might get overcharged, they are concerned about privacy issues and sometimes they do not receive the goods after ordering them and paying the bill.
On of the most important issues for e-commerce is physical delivery of the goods. Many online companies have fallen down on the hurdles of the logistics. Amazon, which is prehistoric by Internet standards, was smart enough to invest heavily in warehouse automation and dispatch, which certainly paid off, because it now benefits from a very good reputation for service.
Now companies look more at how e-commerce can be used in conjunction with other methods of selling, for example many retailers now combine traditional retail outlets and online operations, rather than pure e-tailing. Nowadays most of the large brick-and-mortar shops, such as JC Penney, have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web, profiting on multichannel retailing.
There are multiple opinions on the future of e-commerce. Some say all business will be some day done online, others argue that there will always be a great demand for offline operations.
There is also an opinion that the biggest impact of the Internet is going to be in B2B applications. B2B can be open to all interested parties (for example, commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Using Internet in B2B operations is expected to lead to massive cost reductions through the elimination of processing on paper.
There has also been a prediction that online sales will develop fastest where there are no goods to have to be physically delivered. This has already proved to be true: online purchasing of air tickets, hotels, virtual services are now widely spread.
The e-commerce landscape is still very much in its formation, especially in the countries, where Internet usage is lower than in the highly developed ones. This refers to Russia as well. It is only recently that online financial operations became common in our country. Still, Russian-language Internet is a huge way behind English-speaking web, it has less volume, it is less profitable and less reliable. However, I think we can expect it to grow, because more and more people start using the web actively. There are also some interesting trends, for example, Cyrillic domain names are being registered at the moment, which means even people, who do not speak English, will be able to use the Internet.
(2010)
During the peak of the dot com bubble in the late 1990s, many companies were raising vast amounts of money from investors for their online projects. For example, Lastminute.com was founded on the original and attractive idea of catering for people who’d like to do something at the last minute. The project went through several ownership changes and faced heavy criticism.
However, despite all the problems, Lastminute.com still exists and develops, while the great number of other online projects failed. The hype around e-commerce abated. It turned out that people are too often frustrated of using e-commerce sites. They experience technical difficulties, they might get overcharged, they are concerned about privacy issues and sometimes they do not receive the goods after ordering them and paying the bill.
On of the most important issues for e-commerce is physical delivery of the goods. Many online companies have fallen down on the hurdles of the logistics. Amazon, which is prehistoric by Internet standards, was smart enough to invest heavily in warehouse automation and dispatch, which certainly paid off, because it now benefits from a very good reputation for service.
Now companies look more at how e-commerce can be used in conjunction with other methods of selling, for example many retailers now combine traditional retail outlets and online operations, rather than pure e-tailing. Nowadays most of the large brick-and-mortar shops, such as JC Penney, have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web, profiting on multichannel retailing.
There are multiple opinions on the future of e-commerce. Some say all business will be some day done online, others argue that there will always be a great demand for offline operations.
There is also an opinion that the biggest impact of the Internet is going to be in B2B applications. B2B can be open to all interested parties (for example, commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Using Internet in B2B operations is expected to lead to massive cost reductions through the elimination of processing on paper.
There has also been a prediction that online sales will develop fastest where there are no goods to have to be physically delivered. This has already proved to be true: online purchasing of air tickets, hotels, virtual services are now widely spread.
The e-commerce landscape is still very much in its formation, especially in the countries, where Internet usage is lower than in the highly developed ones. This refers to Russia as well. It is only recently that online financial operations became common in our country. Still, Russian-language Internet is a huge way behind English-speaking web, it has less volume, it is less profitable and less reliable. However, I think we can expect it to grow, because more and more people start using the web actively. There are also some interesting trends, for example, Cyrillic domain names are being registered at the moment, which means even people, who do not speak English, will be able to use the Internet.
(2010)