How E-commerce Can Reduce Cycle Time, Improve Employees' Empowerment and Facilitate Customer Support?

The implementation of e-commerce will bring the following advantages to the company such as reducing cycle time, improving employees’ empowerment and facilitating customer support.

Reduction in cycle time means that the process of business cycle becomes shorter. For example, the purchasing material, receiving the order and checking the delivery can be quicker by process them on the internet. In the traditional way, the customer must go to the retail shop to buy what they want even they got the product catalogs. By using the e-commerce, customer can buy the product by using point and click. This makes the process of buying easier and faster. On the other hand, the digital products and services can transfer in seconds by using internet.

Improvement of employees’ empowerment means giving the employee more authority and let them participate in decision making. Employees’ empowerment is part of the eCRM. ECRM stand for electronic customer relationship management. Employee is the front line between company and customers. Employees posses with the IT knowledge and skill can involved in the decision making for strategy of e-commerce. This makes the decision making become more efficiency.

Facilitating customer support can be done by reply customer inquiry. Customer can send their inquiry about the products and services by e-mail. However, company reply the e-mail manually is difficult and require a lot of time. The development of Autoresponders system makes the job easier. The Autoresponders can reply questions frequently asked and automatically send the answer back to the customer.

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An example of an e-commerce failure and its causes

Webvan was founded by Louis Borders in the year 1999. Yahoo and Goldman Sachs are considers as original investors of Webvan, who encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure to deliver groceries in a number of cities. Webvan try to build a new image for grocery store by publish window delivery which take only 30 minutes to receive the groceries at over 26 cities in American.
However, there are a lot of complaints towards customer services provided which state that the orders have to take one day or more in advance. It is an error seriously compromises the concept of instant delivery and thus it become one of the reasons for demand drop.

In fact, the expansion of webvan is also view as growing too fast as the sales are insufficient to cover up its expenses. It has invested much of their money on the infrastructure which includes automated warehouses, a fleet of vans and logistics software. All these investment are in purpose to reduce the real estate fees and employees payment via the help of technology. Furthermore, the fundamental assumptions of Webvan are also a mistake. This is say so because the consumers don’t mind and won’t stop from step into grocery shop and stand in the long queue instead of online booking. Some analysts also claim that the senior executives are lack of management experience in the supermarket industry. Finally, the company unable to cover up its loss and file the bankruptcy in year 2001. Webvan is now recognized as one of the dotcom failure in history.

The History and Evolution of E-commerce

The logo of NCSA Mosaic.

The history of e-commerce is started from 1960s after the development of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI provided a platform for the data transferring within company and make the data digitalized. However, the use of EDI required high cost in that time and in slow and complex development. In 1992, the appearance of Mosaic web browser moved the e-commerce to new era. This web browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It is the first web browser can display the image and text in one window. This let the process of e-commerce become more easily. Afterwards, Netscape browser was developed and it is downloadable.

This is the Mosaic web browser 0.6 beta for Windows.

Another technology to boost the e-commerce was the development of DSL. DSL enable the connection to internet quicker so it can increase the speed of business transactions. The competition of Linux and Windows started after the development of Red Hat Linux. Users got more choices for platform other than Windows. In 2000, the merger of AOL and Time Warner provided a huge profit for the economic and this also one of the major steps of e-commerce. After the attack of hacker, the improvement of security becomes the biggest issue in e-commerce. On the other hand, the dot-com collapse attack the e-commerce market and made many online company disappear. Even though the issues of hacker and dot-com collapse, the improvement of e-commerce cannot be stopped.

The e-commerce normally was use for B2B (business-to-business) transactions in the beginning and it is also the largest profit maker in e-commerce market now. The C2C (consumer-to-consumer) becomes more and more popular in these few years. For example, the famous auction website such as eBay. P2P (peer-to-peer) is also one of the important model in e-commerce. It enables to share file and resource to each user. However, It is easy to offend the law of piracy.

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