Advantages of eCommerce

Electronic commerce has expanded rapidly over the past five years and is predicted to continue at this rate, or even accelerate. In the near future the boundaries between "conventional" and "electronic" commerce will become increasingly blurred as more and more businesses move sections of their operations onto the Internet.

E-Commerce has a great number of advantages. Some of them are:

1. FOR SELLERS

- Using E-Commerce, the sellers can expand their businesses to national and international levels with minimum capital investment. The seller can easily find more customers, B2B, best suppliers and suitable business partners across the globe.

- E-Commerce helps sellers reduce the cost to create process, distribute, retrieve and manage the paper based information by digitizing the information.

- E-Commerce improves the brand image of the company/shop/market.

- E-Commerce helps sellers provide better customer services.

- E-Commerce helps to simplify the business processes and make them faster and efficient.

- E-Commerce reduces paper work.

- E-Commerce increased the productivity of the seller, his shop/market. It supports "pull" type supply management. In "pull" type supply management, a business process starts when a request comes from a customer and it uses just-in-time manufacturing way.

2. FOR CUSTOMERS

- 24x7 support. Customer can do transactions for the product or inquiry about any product/services provided by the seller any time, any where from any location. Here, 24x7 refers to 24 hours of each seven days of a week.

- E-Commerce application provides user more options and quicker delivery of products.

- E-Commerce application provides user more options to compare and select the cheaper and better option.

- A customer can put review comments about a product and can see what others are buying or analyze the review comments of other customers before making a final order.

- E-Commerce provides the option of virtual auctions.

- A customer can see the relevant detailed information within seconds rather than waiting for days or weeks.

- E-Commerce increases competition among the sellers and as result they provides substantial discounts to customers.

3. FOR THE ECONOMY

- Customers need not to travel to shop a product thus less traffic on road and low air pollution.

- E-Commerce helps reducing cost of products so less affluent people can also afford the products.

- E-Commerce has enabled access to services and products to rural areas as well which are otherwise not available to them.

- E-Commerce helps government to deliver public services like health care, education, social services at reduced cost and in improved way.