History of e-commerce

Case in Point: ITC e-chaupal

• ITC's Agri-Business
– one of India's largest exporters of agricultural
products
• Problems:
– insufficient control over supply chain
– lack of infrastructure for storage, handling and
transportation of produce
– middlemen and other intermediaries blocking market
and price information
– no direct control over quality of products
• network villages and procure Agri products for export
purposes.
• Illiterate farmers who lacked basic knowledge of IT
were conducting e-commerce transactions.
• farmers get all types of crop related information and
they can sell their produce directly to ITC in ITC
collection centers.
• made use of IT tools to network villages and internet to
provide information to farmers and others
 Electronic Commerce
• Modern business methodology that addresses
needs of organizations, merchants and
consumers to cut costs while improving
quality of goods and services and increasing
speed of service delivery.
• Use of computer networks to search and
retrieve information in support of human and
corporate decision making
• Buying and selling of information, products
and services via computer networks today and
in the future
• Combines a range of processes:
– Electronic data interchange (EDI)
– Electronic mail (E-mail)
– World Wide Web (WWW)
– Internet Applications
• Websites are becoming gateway to a
company’s brand, products and services.
– A rival is just a mouse-click away
• Offer goods through bigger sites already
having a lot of traffic – amazon, flipkart etc.
• Formation of new types of products –
interactive games, electronic books etc.
 E-Business
• Conduct of automated business transactions
by means of electronic communication
networks end to end.
– Succession of automated business processes and
information systems of different companies, which
are involved in an inter-company business
transaction, and are successfully integrated
– Integrated designers, suppliers, partners and
buyers
• Companies link internal and external
processes more efficiently and flexibly, work
more closely with suppliers and better satisfy
the needs and expectations of their
customers.
Early Business Information Interchange
Efforts
• 1950’s – use of computers to store records of
business transactions.
– Information flow on paper
• 1960’s – punched cards or magnetic tapes to
exchange information by businesses having large
volumes of transactions
• 1968 – Transportation Data Co-ordination
Committee was formed by a groups of freight and
shopping companies
– Explored ways to reduce paperwork burden
• 1979 – American National Standard Institute
(ANSI) created a committee to develop uniform
EDI standards
– Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ASC X12)
– Includes IT professionals from over 800 business
organizations
• 1987 – United Nations published its first standard
(EDI for Administration, Commerce & Transport
EDIFACT)
– Companies unable to afford EDI began to view
internet as a potential replacement for leased lines
and dial-up connections
 Emergence of Internet
Assignment I
• Write a short note on the emergence of
Internet and its various business applications.
• 1972 – researcher wrote a program that could
send and receive messages over the Internet
Protocol (IP) Network
– E-mail was born
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP) enabled users to
transfer files between computers
• Telnet – lets users log into their computer
accounts from remote sites
 Emergence of World Wide Web
• Hypertext – Douglas Engelbart created the
first hypertext experimental system in 1960’s
• 1965 – term Hypertext was coined by Ted
Nelson
– Text that is not constrained to be sequential
– Links documents to form a web of relationships
– Makes chunks of ideas available for inclusion in
many parts of multiple texts
– Hypermedia – hypertext not constrained to be text
• 1989 – Tim Berners Lee – at CERN proposed a
hypertext system (Hypertext & CERN)
– A user interface that would be consistent with all
platforms and that would allow users to access
information from many different computers
– A scheme for this interface to access a variety of
document types and information protocols
– A provision for universal access which would allow
any user on the network to access any information
• 1991 – gateway from the web to Wide Area
Information Server (WAIS) software was
completed
– January 15, 1991 – WWW became publicly
available from CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la
Recherche Nucleaire)
• 1993 – 50 web servers in existence and first
graphical interfaces for Windows and
Macintosh became available
• 1995 – web development marked by rapid
commercialization and technical change
– Netscape Communication’s Browser, Netscape
Navigator (Mozilla), continued to include more
extensions of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
– May 1995 – more than 15000 known public web
servers
 HTTP
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• Internet protocol responsible for transferring
and displaying web pages
• Runs in application layer of TCP/IP Model
 E-commerce Advantages
• 24 * 7 operations
• Global Reach
• Cost of acquiring, serving and retaining customers is
low
• An extended enterprise is easy to build
• Disintermediation
• Improved customer service to your clients
• Power to provide the best of both the worlds
• A technology-based customer interface
• The customer controls the interaction
• Knowledge of customer behaviour
 E-commerce Disadvantages
• Some business processes may face difficulties
transforming
– Perishable products, high cost items
• Costs and benefits are hard to quantify
• Recruiting and retaining employees with the
required technical know-how is difficult
• Cultural and legal obstacles
• Consumer resistance to change