May-2015

COMMUNIQUE
E-COMMERCE
nomic concepts. As such, e-commerce impact on many
areas of business and disciplines of business management
studies.
i. Marketing – issues of on-line advertising, marketing
strategies and consumer behavior and cultures. One of
the areas in which it impacts particularly is direct marketing.
In the past this was mainly door-to door, home
parties (like the Tupperware parties) and mail order using
catalogues or leaflets. This moved to telemarketing and
TV selling with the advances in telephone and television
technology and finally developed into e-marketing
spawning (customer relationship management) data mining
and the like by creating new channels for direct sales
and promotion.
ii. Computer sciences – development of different network
and computing technologies and languages to support
e-commerce and e-business, for example, linking front
and back office legacy systems with the ‘web based’ technology.
iii. Finance and accounting – on-line banking; issues of transaction
costs; accounting and auditing implications where
‘intangible’ assets and human capital must be tangibly valued
in an increasingly knowledge based economy.
iv. Economics – the impact of e-commerce on local and
global economies; understanding the concepts of a digital
and knowledge-based economy and how this fits into
economic theory.
v. Production and operations management – the impact of online
processing has led to reduced cycle times. It takes
seconds to deliver digitized products and services electronically;
similarly the time for processing orders can be
reduced by more than 90 per cent from days to minutes.
Production systems are integrated with finance, marketing
and other functional systems as well as with business
partners and customers.
vi. Production and operations management (manufacturing) –
moving from mass production to demand-driven, mass
customization, customer pull rather than the manufacturer
push of the past. Web-based Enterprise Resource
Planning systems (ERP) can also be used to forward orders
directly to designers and/or production floor within
seconds, thus cutting production cycle times by up to
50 per cent, especially when manufacturing plants, engineers
and designers are located in different countries.
vii. Management information systems – analysis, design
and implementation of e-business systems within an organization;
issues of integration of front-end and backend
systems.
viii. Human resource management – issues of on-line recruiting,
home working and ‘entrepreneurs’ working on
a project by project basis replacing permanent employees.
ix. Business law and ethics – the different legal and ethical
issues that have arisen as a result of a global ‘virtual’ market.
Such as copyright laws, privacy of customer information,
legality of electronic contracts, etc.
How does E-commerce work?
The online consumer or customer enters the merchant’s
website through the internet. When the customer decides
to purchase something, he is taken to the online transaction
server, where all of the information he provides
are encrypted. Once the order is placed, the information
moves through a private gateway to a processing network,
where the issuing and acquiring banks complete or deny
the transaction. This generally takes place in no more than
a few seconds. There are many different payment systems
available to accommodate the varied processing needs of
merchants, from those who have a few orders a day to
those who process thousands of transactions daily. With the
addition of secure socket layer technology, e-commerce is
also a very safe way to complete transactions.
Types of E-commerce Applications (Business
Models)
The applications spawning out of the e-commerce initiative
can be broadly grouped into some categories on the
basis of common business transactions. Some important
models are:
Business-to-Business (B2B): The exchange of products,
services or information between business entities.
Most of the business transactions have done through this
application in India and also in the global market.
Business-to-Consumer (B2C): The exchange of
products, information or services between business and
consumers in a retailing relationship. Some of the first
examples of B-to-C e-commerce were amazon.com and
dell.com in the USA and lastminute.com in the UK.
Business-to-Government (B2G): The exchange of
information, services and products between business organizations
and government agencies on-line.
Consumer-to-Business (C2B): This is the exchange
of products, information or services from individuals to
business. A classic example of this would be individuals
selling their services to businesses.
Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C): In this category
consumers interact directly with other consumers.
Government-to-Business (G2B): The exchange of
information, services and products between government
72 the MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANT MAY 2015
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