E-Commerce

Last November 12, 2009, I was able to attend the Digital Filipino E-Commerce Summit held at the Hotel Intercontinental, Makati City. Invited speakers include Donald Patrick Lim, CEO of Yehey, Stephanie Caragos, President and CEO of Syntactics Inc., and of course, my cousin, Arnold A. Alvarez of BF Homes Properties to name a few. There is this one statement of Mr. Lim of Yehey that stuck in my mind, which is "robo" which means that the consumers "research online, buy offline". Those are actually true specially in our country. I think that we are still new with the concept of E-Commerce, and we are still in the infant stage in doing it. All the speakers agree that there is a great potential in making money thru E-Commerce.

What a coincidence that the E-commerce report was assigned to me in our Emarke class. The following is the summary of my report about E-Commerce.

E-Commerce

Our world as it is today could not survive without the internet. Almost every business or corporation uses the internet as a vital part of their business. As the use of the internet has become more and more prevalent in our daily lives, so have new internet terms and slang. New words and acronyms like blog, LOL, and Googling have been introduced into our daily vocabulary. Another common internet term is e-commerce.

E-Commerce, which stands for electronic commerce (also called electronic marketing) is a way of buying and selling goods using electronic systems such as the internet or other computer networks. Every year the amount of business transacted over the internet grows exponentially. This use has especially grown with inventions like electronic funds transfer, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange, etc.

Though some e-commerce involves the transaction of funds for virtual products, like premium content on a website, advertisements or characters and content for MMORPGs (Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games), most e-commerce involves the transportation of physical items. Most large retail stores have an online website for purchasing goods as well as a physical location. This type of e-commerce is called business to consumer. Business to consumer e-commerce is an enormous rapidly expanding market. A consumer can go online and purchase just about anything, from inexpensive items like books, movies, or groceries, to expensive investments like cars and real estate.

E-commerce is can be categorized into the following:

• Business -to -Business (B2B)

• Business- to- Customer (B2C)

• Consumer-to-Business (C2B )

• Consumer- to -consumer (C2C)

Business to business is one in which a company deals with another company for business and exchanging of goods, products, services. Some of the examples of b2b e-commerce sites are a company's official site, brokering sites etc.

Business to customer is one where the company sells its goods to the customer or trades with the customers. This is electronic retailing and called as e-tailing in common. One of the best examples is amazon.com.

Consumer to business is when a customer works for a certain company for business and the company buys it, here the consumer has to price the trade. Example for such a site is priceline.com

Consumer to consumer is more like auctioning, bartending, etc... where a consumer places bid and other buys it. Here the websites acts an intermediate for the business Example for such sites is eBay.

E-Commerce provides advantages to both the Business provider, consumers. For the business it is provides easier way to market a particular product at low cost and also the product easily reaches the global market. For the consumers they can buy products from home, so no tedious work in buying and they can trade any time. E-commerce thus is a greater benefit provided it has ultimate security.

Another aspect of e-commerce is online banking. With just a few clicks, a person can transfer funds from one account to the other, pay bills, buy stocks, or wire money overseas. All major banks and credit unions have the option of online banking.

Most likely majority of us has purchased something over the internet or used online banking. We are all part of the growing business of e-commerce.