Ecommerce Questions

What is E-Commerce?

Electronic-commerce (E-commerce) is the practice of buying and selling products and services over the Internet. Just as the Internet itself has seen a phenomenal rate of growth over the past 10 years, the amount of E-Commerce being conducted over the Internet has also grown at a extraordinary rate with more and more businesses conducting E-commerce as they realise the Internet and E-commerce opens up a huge new market for them to trade in with relatively low overheads.

Today, businesses of all shapes and sizes have a presence on the Internet, from small single person outfits to huge multinationals, they are all utilising the Internet to open up new markets and grow through promoting and trading their products and services locally, nationally and around the world.

Businesses such as Amazon and eBay have now become household names, they are two businesses which are 100% Internet based for retail, no shop fronts or stores, with Amazon being a market leader in online retail, selling commercial products all over the world, and eBay being the market leader in giving businesses and individuals a simple means to sell virtually any kind of product to a massive market of potential customers.

E-commerce is generally divided into two different formats, where Businesses only trade online with other businesses, it is called B2B (Business to Business), and where Businesses sell to a wide range of customers it is called B2C (Business to Consumer)… a large company such as Amazon is a prime example of E-commerce conducted in a B2C manner.

How does E-Commerce work?

Looking at the most common and widely recognised format of E-Commerce, B2C (Business to Consumer) where businesses are selling products and services over the Internet through their web site to customers visiting the site.

To understand it in simple terms, a business puts on its web site the products or services it wishes to sell with some kind of facility for visitors to the web site to purchase them, this is usually in the shape of an online shopping cart. Visitors to the business’s web site can browse through the products and services available, and using the online shopping cart can simply select products and services they wish to purchase, and when done they go through some form of secure payment process, usually where payment is made through a credit card. The business receives notification that a purchase has been made, checks to see if payment has successfully been made – and then they go about shipping the products or services to the customer. Nice and easy!

Today, a business does not need to spend lots of money to begin buying and selling online through their own web site, it can be done for surprisingly low amounts, so it is simple for any business to open themselves up to new markets and begin to sell products or services online.

Recruitment for your business

Use online resources for hiring people online; such as s1jobs or monster. These sites and many others on the internet allow you to put on a job description and within hours you can reach a massive audience.