What is E-Commerce?

Now a day the companies like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Google, Apple, and Facebook are the part of our life. 

Same way the companies like uber, ola, zomato are also the part of our life we can say. All these and these types of companies are serving on-demand services in various fields from home appliances to the travel and hotels.

E-commerce (Electronic Commerce or Internet Commerce) signifies to buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, addition with that the transaction of the money and data to execute these services are executes using internet. 

In another word, selling of physical product online refers to the e-commerce. 

E-commerce also describes any kind of commercial transaction that is facilitated through the internet. 

Small businesses, large companies/ corporations, and independent freelancers have lots of benefits from the e-commerce, which enables them to sell their products and services that was not possible or they are difficult with traditional offline retail.

There are four business models for the e-commerce : 

1. Business to Business (B2B) 
2. Business to Customer (B2C) 
3. Customer to Customer (C2C) 
4. Customer to Business (C2B). 

The various examples of the e-commerce companies are Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Fiverr, Upwork, Olx, Quikr etc.

The work of the Web:

The Internet physically includes the following:

• The personal computer on which you sit on the Internet.

• A web browser is software installed on your computer that enables you to service / browse the Internet.

• Internet connection provided by ISP and connects you to the Internet to reach any website.

• A web server is a computer that hosts a website.

• Routers and switches are a combination of software and hardware that take your request and send it to the appropriate web server.

• The web is a type of client-server system where your computer is a client and remote computer servers that store electronic files.

How the Internet Works:

When you enter something like https://technicalpublications.org/ the request goes to a specialized computer on the Internet called DNS - Domain (it can be single or multiple computers, but the request goes to one of these computers). Name Servers. 

Routers and switches send all requests. Contains a table of DNS machine names and their IP addresses. When you type https://technicalpublications.org/ it translates to int. This number identifies the computer that serves your technology publishing website.

To view any page on the web, you need to start the process by requesting a page using your web browser. The browser prompts the DNS to translate the requested domain name into an IP address. 

Fixed call request that the browser sends to the server for the page you want using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The server must be constantly on the Internet and always ready to deliver pages to visitors. When a server receives a request, it searches for the requested document and delivers the document to the web browser. 

Meanwhile, the server records the client's IP address, the requested document and the date and time it requested. This information varies from server to server.

When making any request for a webpage, a web browser is required to request multiple files from the web server, such as the HTML page, any images, style sheets, and other resources used on the webpage. 

Each of these files, including the home page, requires a URL to identify each item, and this item will be sent to the web browser by the web server. The web browser collects this information and displays it in the form of a web page.

Systematic Approach to Build an E-Commerce 

Knowledge of business, social issues, technology and systematic approach are required for building a successful e-commerce presence. E-commerce is simply too important to be in any way left absolutely to technologists and software engineers.

The Two major challenges are as follow : 

Developing a clear understanding of business objective : 

• This need you to prepare a plan foe developing your company’s online presence 

Knowing how to pick the correct technology to accomplish those objective :

• This challenge needs you to have some basic e-commerce infrastructure knowledge. 

Even in case the development work of e-commerce application is outsourced, then also it is advisable to have development plan and some knowledge of basic issues related to e-commerce infrastructure like capability, cost and constraints. Without proper knowledge and plan, you won’t be able to make proper choices regarding e-commerce within your company. 

For example, consider you are a project manager for medium-sized industrial parts company in Bangalore. 15,00,000/- were allotted to you for building an e-commerce presence of your company. The main objective will be to sell and provide services to company’s customers, who are majorly small metal fabricating and machine shops, and to engage customers through websites, mostly through user forums and blogs. 

First, you must make choices in some major areas like Management, Hardware Architecture, Software, HR, Design and Telecommunications.

On the organizational and HR fronts, you should unite a group of people who have abilities expected to develop and manage a successful e-commerce presence. This group will make the critical choices about business objectives and strategy, design, technology, and social and information policies. 

The whole development effort should be firmly overseen on the off chance that you hope to avoid the disasters that have happened at certain organizations. 

You will likewise have to make choices regarding software, hardware, and telecommunications infrastructure. The requests of your clients should drive your decisions of technology.

Your clients will need technology that empowers them to discover what they need effectively, see the product, buy the product, and afterward get the product from your distribution centers quickly.

You will likewise need to be careful about design. Whenever you have recognized the key choice areas, you should consider a plan for the project.