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Electronic Commerce On The Internet And Electronic Publishing
Electronic commerce has existed in a variety of formats for many years. The banking and retail industries were
among the first industry sectors to apply technology to business and customer transactions with the introduction
of Automatic Transfer Machines (ATM) and Electronic Point of Sales (EPOS) technologies.
Electronic commerce on the internet is usually associated with the ordering and payment of goods via electronic
means, but with physical delivery. The form of electronic commerce this book is concerned with is the selling of
digital goods and the delivery of those digital goods and services over the Internet exclusively.
The generic term "electronic commerce" concerns the buying and selling of goods and services via electronic
networks involving some sort of payment.
Electronic commerce has been defined as being in three distinct classes, inter-organizational (business-to-business
or as it's expressed on-line, B2B), intra-organizational (within a single business structure) and business-to-consumer
(B2C). An additional transactional class has risen with the consumer-to-consumer market or the C2C ecommerce model
such as http://www.eBay.com, http://www.infopost.com/ and other personal trading communities or PTC's where consumers trade directly
with other consumers. As a side note: One of the developments that will increase C2C transactions in the future,
potentially, is the increased use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. P2P allows direct communication of personal computers.
Inter-organizational electronic commerce, B2B, could be defined as being the natural successor to Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI) because it includes document and inventory management as well as supply chain and distribution
management.
Intra-organizational electronic commerce integrates various functions within the organization to help the flow
of information, such as work flow communications, electronic publishing, data warehousing and data mining. Intranet
technology is an example of this application in action.
Electronic commerce enables customers to search for on-line goods and services, buy products on the Internet and
in some cases have electronic products delivered directly to their desktops by download or streaming (real-time)
delivery methods.
How did commerce begin on the Internet? Has it always occurred? Why has it grown so fast in just the last few years?
The answers should help keep the Internet in perspective to other forms of commerce that have been with us for
many centuries.
Commerce didn't occurred on the Internet until after April 1995, when the government sold network blocks of ARPANet
(the network that became the basis for the Internet).
The Internet ( or the inter-networking of computers) was funded mainly by U.S. military sources and consisted of
a number of individual computers connected by leased lines and using a packet-switching scheme. In 1995 the infrastructure
of the Internet was sold to the private telecommunications company, MCI. Prior to that, blatant advertising and
any form of commerce was forbidden due to use restrictions imposed on the system by the government.
That meant that commerce could not take place. It was a system for academic research and military strategic use
and early users carry this history with them and many are opposed to the Internet's commercial capabilities, even
today. That may explain the resistance, that's still prevalent today, regarding blatant advertising or "spam"
on the Internet. |
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Entire Contents © Copyright 2001 by David Vallieres. All rights reserved. |