E-COMMERCE AND SECURITY ISSUES

E-commerce advantages, disadvantages and security issues

E-Commerce; Advantages, Disadvantages and Security Issues

I will begin this essay by clearly defining e-commerce and the types of e-commerce, in doing so; I will state some advantages and disadvantages of this phenomenon. Basically doing business online, typically via the Web (Eli 2005 ). It is also called "e-business," "e-tailing" and "I-commerce." Although in most cases e-commerce and e-business are synonymous, e-commerce implies that goods and services can be purchased online, whereas e-business might be used as more of an umbrella term for a total presence on the Web, which would naturally include the e-commerce (shopping) component and the electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as Business-to-business or B2B (Robert 2005 ). B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market), while E-commerce that is conducted between business and customer is referred to as Business-to-customer or B2C, and lastly E-commerce between business and government is referred to as Business-to-government or B2G (Yevgeny Carl 2008 ). E-commerce may also refer to electronic data interchange (EDI), in which one company's computer queries and transmits purchase orders to another company's computer (Christine 2007).

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages of conducting business electronically, some advantages that can be achieved from e-commerce include being able to conduct business, e-commerce systems can operate all day every day, access the global marketplace the Internet spans the world, and it is possible to do business with any business or person who is connected to the Internet, speed (Eli 2005). Electronic communications allow messages to traverse the world almost instantaneously; there is no need to wait weeks for a catalogue to arrive by post: that communications delay is not a part of the Internet / e-commerce world, market space; The market in which web-based businesses operate is the global market, it may not be evident to them, but many businesses are already facing international competition from web-enabled businesses, opportunity to reduce costs; (Robert 2005 ) The Internet makes it very easy to 'shop around' for products and services that may be cheaper or more effective than we might otherwise settle for, computer platform-independent; many, if not most, computers have the ability to communicate via the Internet independent of operating systems and hardware. Customers are not limited by existing hardware systems' (Yevgeny Carl 2008), efficient applications development environment - 'in many respects, applications can be more efficiently developed and distributed because the can be built without regard to the customer's or the business partner's technology platform, allowing customer self service and 'customer outsourcing' (Eli 2005 ). People can interact with businesses at any hour of the day that it is convenient to them, and because these interactions are initiated by customers, the customers also provide a lot of the data for the transaction that may otherwise need to be entered by business staff. This means that some of the work and costs are effectively shifted to customers; ...