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Ecommerce Vs EBusiness |
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While the words Commerce and Business don't have much difference in English and in
fact are largely interchangeable as nouns describing organized profit-seeking
activity, there is a difference between eCommerce
and eBusiness.
The difference is quite artificial, but different terms do carry different meanings. The first
wave of thinking about electronic business was a reaction to the success of
Amazon and Dell in selling products over the Internet. Electronic business transactions
involving money are "eCommerce" activities. However,
there is much more to eBusiness than selling products: what about marketing,
procurement and customer education? Even to sell on-line successfully, much
more is required than merely having a website that accepts credit cards. We
need to have a web site that people want to visit, accurate catalog information
and good logistics. In brief, you need business acumen coupled with with a robust Ecommerce Platform.
The term "eBusiness" was introduced as a
deliberate attempt to say to people: "Your first understanding of
eCommerce was too narrow. To be successful, we need to think more
broadly."
E-business goes far beyond e-commerce or buying and selling over the Internet, and deep
into the processes and cultures of an enterprise. It is the powerful business
environment that is created when you connect critical business systems directly
to customers, employees, vendors, and business partners, using Intranets,
Extranets, ecommerce technologies, collaborative applications, and the Web. Dell Computer
gets a lot of attention as a pioneering e-business today and is the best
example of this form of business. It sells $ 15m worth of computers from its
websites each day. The company has created a ‘fully integrated value chain ’ –
a three-way information partnership with its suppliers and customers by
treating them as collaborators who together find ways of improving efficiency
across the entire chain of supply and demand. Dell's suppliers have real-time
access to information about its orders. Through its corporate extranet, they
can organize their production and delivery to ensure that their customer always
has just enough of the right parts to keep the production line moving smoothly.
By plugging its suppliers directly into the customer database, Dell has ensured
that they will instantly know about changes in their demand. Similarly, by
allowing entry to customers into its supply chain via its website, Dell enables
them to track the progress of their orders from the factory to their doorstep.
Successful new-businesses can emerge from nowhere. Trends suggest it takes
little more than two years for a start-up to emerge out of nowhere, formulate
an innovative business idea, establish a web-presence and reach a dominant
position in its chosen sector. The high valuation of the stocks of such
start-ups and the massive amount of venture capital flowing into their
businesses is proof enough that complacency is foolhardy here. America has
already reached a threshold in e-business, from where it is set to accelerate
into hyper-growth, as per Forrester Research. Britain and Germany will go into
the same level of hyper-growth two years after America, with Japan, France and
Italy, a further two years behind.
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In the past the rules of business were simple – Beat the competition, squeeze your suppliers and
keep your customers in the dark. But with increased collaboration in the completely networked world,
uncertainties arise. Nobody can predict how the customer with all the perfect
market information available at his disposal will respond to the rapidly
shifting business alliances and federations or how companies will manage such
customers. The need of the hour is a good strategy. Have a Look at few
successful ebusiness companies
which have backed opportunities provided by ebusiness with right strategy and are
earning respectable business rewards. Early e-commerce companies
have used their understanding of the technology’s potential and the absence of
any competition to steal a march and enter markets that would previously have
been closed to them, but in future simply having a good business idea and being
technologically smart might not be enough. The global giants, after taking a
while to see the opportunity seem to have worked out how to adapt their
multi-layered supply chains and diverse distribution channels and are finally
getting into the race.
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eCommerce
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