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| { E-commerce Solutions } |
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| Most people think e-commerce means online shopping--workaholics pointing their browsers to Amazon.com to order an emergency present because they forgot someone's birthday again. |
| But Web shopping is only a small part of the eCommerce picture. The term also refers to online stock and bond transactions and buying and downloading software without ever going near a store. In addition, e-commerce includes business-to-business connections that make purchasing easier for big corporations. And many people hope that so-called micro transactions will let people pay small amounts--a few cents or a few dollars--to access online content or games. |
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| Is eCommerce Safe? |
Although Internet security breaches have gotten a lot of press, most vendors and analysts argue that transactions are actually less dangerous in cyberspace than in the physical world.
That's because a great deal of credit card fraud is caused by retail sales employees who handle card numbers. E-commerce systems remove temptation by encrypting the numbers on a company's servers. For merchants, e-commerce is actually safer than opening a store that could be looted, burned, or flooded. The difficulty is in getting customers to believe that e-commerce is safe for them.
But ever since the 2.0 versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, transactions can be encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol that creates a secure connection to the server, protecting the information as it travels over the Internet. SSL uses public key encryption, one of the strongest encryption methods around. A way to tell that a Web site is secured by SSL is when the URL begins with https instead of http.
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| How Can Small Businesses Take Advantage of eCommerce? |
Large companies pour millions into fancy e-commerce sites, but even mom-and-pop shops can make money on the Web with a simple, no-frills site.
Sometimes, all it takes to succeed is the promotional savvy to get noticed by customers. Word of mouth, postings in newsgroups, and registration with search engines may be enough to get the customers rolling into your site.
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| What Is the Future of eCommerce? |
Rest assured, there is a bright future for e-commerce. Once the details of online commerce are worked out, it and the Internet in general could reshape the structure of the business world.
The huge growth of virtual communities--people getting together in ad hoc interest groups online--promises to shift the balance of economic power from the manufacturer to the consumer. At least, that's the view of John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong, a pair of analysts at McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting firm.
These virtual communities are already making their presence felt. They erode the marketing and sales advantages of large companies. A small company with a better product and better customer service can use these communities to challenge larger competitors--something it probably couldn't do in the real world.
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