Importance of E-commerce in business.

Electronic commerce, or Ecommerce, which literally means business trading through the Internet, has been around the globe since mid 90s. However, until the recent few years, Ecommerce is getting more and more attention from entrepreneur and consumers, both local and international. One of the main reasons is due to the highly successful operations of some well known names on the Internet, such as eBay, Yahoo and Dell. The sales revenue these companies shown in their annual reports are without doubt, one of the biggest factors why Ecommerce is important in the commercial market nowadays.

Ecommerce proved its importance based on the fact where time is essence. In the commercial markets, time plays an important role to both the business and consumers. From the business perspective, with less time spent during each transaction, more transaction can be achieved on the same day. As for the consumer, they will save up more time during their transaction. Because of this, Ecommerce steps in and replaced the traditional commerce method where a single transaction can cost both parties a lot of valuable time. With just a few clicks in minutes, a transaction or an order can be placed and completed via the internet with ease. For instance, a banking transaction can be completed through the Internet within a few minutes compared to the traditional banking method which may take up to hours. This fact obviously proves that Ecommerce is beneficial to both business and consumer wise as payment and documentations can be completed with greater efficiency.

From the business viewpoint, Ecommerce is much more cost effective compared to traditional commerce method. This is due to the fact where through Ecommerce, the cost for the middleperson to sell their products can be saved and diverted to another aspect of their business. One example is the giant computer enterprise, Dell, which practice such a method by running most of their business through internet without involving any third parties. Aside from that, marketing for Ecommerce can achieve a better customer to cost ratio as putting an advertisement on the internet is comparably much cheaper than putting up a roadside banner or filming a television commercial. For Ecommerce, the total overheads needed to run the business is significantly much less compared to the traditional commerce method. The reason due to that is where most of the cost can be reduced in Ecommerce. For example, in running an Ecommerce business, only a head office is needed rather than a head office with a few branches to run the business. In addition to that, most of the cost for staff, maintenance, communications and office rental can be substitute by a single cost, web hosting for the Ecommerce business.

To both the consumers and business, connectivity plays an important part as it is the key factor determining the whole business. From the business point of view, Ecommerce provides better connectivity for its potential customer as their respective website can be accessed virtually from anywhere through Internet. This way, more potential customers can get in touch with the company's business and thus, eliminating the limits of geographical location. From the customer standpoint, Ecommerce is much more convenient as they can browse through a whole directories of catalogues without any hassle, compare prices between products, buying from another country and on top of that, they can do it while at home or at work, without any necessity to move a single inch from their chair. Besides that, for both consumers and business, Ecommerce proves to be more convenient as online trading has less red tape compared to traditional commerce method.

In global market sense, the appearance of Ecommerce as a pioneer has opened up various windows of opportunities for a variety of other companies and investors. For instance, due to the booming of Ecommerce, more and more resources are being directed into electronic securities, internet facilities, business plans and new technologies. In result of this phenomenon, a variety of new markets have emerged from Ecommerce itself giving a boost to the global market.

In short, if without any major obstacles, Ecommerce will certainly continue to mature in the global market and eventually, it will become an essential business plan for a company in order to survive and stay competitive in the ever changing market.

                                 WEB

The World Wide Web is another way to describe the Internet, which is a network of computers which are connected and that share information and allow communication around the world

NETWORKED-NETWORK

NETWORKED-NETWORK

Internetworking is the practice of connecting a computer network with other networks through the use of gateways that provide a common method of routing information packets between the networks. The resulting system of interconnected networks is called an internetwork, or simply an internet. Internetworking is a combination of the words inter ("between") and networking; not internet-working or international-network.

The most notable example of internetworking is the Internet, a network of networks based on many underlying hardware technologies, but unified by an internetworking protocol standard, the Internet Protocol Suite, often also referred to as TCP/IP.

The smallest amount of effort to create an internet (an internetwork, not the Internet), is to have two LANs of computers connected to each other via a router. Simply using either a switch or a hub to connect two local area networks together doesn't imply internetworking, it just expands the original LAN.

NSFNET
was a network for research computing deployed in the mid-1980s that in time also became the first backbone infrastructure for the commercial public Internet. Created as a result of a 1985 National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative, NSFNET established a high-speed connection among the five NSF supercomputer centers and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and provided external access for scientists, researchers, and engineers who were not located near the computing centers.

ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) is a predecessor to the modern Internet. It was conceptualized in the 1950s, when computer scientists needed something better than the then available but unreliable switching nodes and network links.There were also only a limited number of large, powerful research computers, and researchers with access were separated geographically. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) commissioned the development of an advanced and reliable way to connect these computers through a newly devised packet switching network, which was known as ARPANET.

                HISTORY OF INTERNET

The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. Beginning with the early research in packet switching, the government, industry and academia have been partners in evolving and deploying this exciting new technology. Today, terms like "bleiner@computer.org" and "http://www.acm.org" trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street. 1

This is intended to be a brief, necessarily cursory and incomplete history. Much material currently exists about the Internet, covering history, technology, and usage. A trip to almost any bookstore will find shelves of material written about the Internet. 2

In this paper,3 several of us involved in the development and evolution of the Internet share our views of its origins and history. This history revolves around four distinct aspects. There is the technological evolution that began with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (and related technologies), and where current research continues to expand the horizons of the infrastructure along several dimensions, such as scale, performance, and higher-level functionality. There is the operations and management aspect of a global and complex operational infrastructure. There is the social aspect, which resulted in a broad community of Internauts working together to create and evolve the technology. And there is the commercialization aspect, resulting in an extremely effective transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure.

The Internet today is a widespread information infrastructure, the initial prototype of what is often called the National (or Global or Galactic) Information Infrastructure. Its history is complex and involves many aspects - technological, organizational, and community. And its influence reaches not only to the technical fields of computer communications but throughout society as we move toward increasing use of online tools to accomplish electronic commerce, information acquisition, and community operations.