E-commerce Management Systems

 

We now live in a global economy, in which goods and services are exchanged across international borders. This has far-reaching consequences.

The rise of e-commerce -- the spread of information networks, telecommunications and information technology -- has accelerated to a new level with the rapid development of the World Wide Web. Information technology has revolutionized many sectors of the economy, including business, finance, government, health care, education, and telecommunications.

E-commerce management systems combine information technology, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and database management. E-commerce management systems support the management of business-to-business transactions and supply chain management.

E-commerce management involves processes such as customer relationship management, supply chain management, and database management. E-commerce management involves processes such as customer relationship management, supply chain management, and database management.

At the time, I was a senior manager at a large Internet retailer. It was the late 1990s, and e-commerce was booming. We were hiring like crazy and were desperately trying to find people with the right mix of technical ability and sales ability.

But something was going wrong. Our sales staff were excellent at finding qualified prospects but lousy at actually getting the orders. Our technical team could build e-commerce applications at breakneck speed but struggled to build a good user interface.

We eventually realized that the problem was twofold: salespeople were hired to sell, not build; and tech people hired to build, not sell.

A little over a year ago, I began noticing some interesting trends that together point toward a new kind of business. The new kind of business is based on buying and selling over the Internet. This new kind of business is fundamentally different from the other two kinds because in this case the buyer is the customer and the seller is the seller.

Businesses that fail to adopt the proper e-commerce management techniques are likely to suffer losses, whether from a missed sales opportunity or from increased overhead costs. Taking these steps helps companies remain profitable and forward-thinking.

Many people imagine that the internet changes everything. It changes prices, it changes how products are distributed, it changes the value chain. But the internet is not a revolution, it is a new way of doing an old thing.

What the internet does is make selling things easier. Before we had the internet, selling things was hard. Customers had to travel from place to place, and you had to help them find what they were looking for. In a virtual economy, selling things is easy. You create a website, sit on it, and wait for customers.

Online commerce is growing fast. We can measure this by the growth of the number of online stores and by the growth of the number of transactions.

But, for several reasons, the growth of the number of online stores is deceptive. You can't tell, by looking at a site, whether there are many small sites or one huge site. And you can't tell, by looking at a site, how many transactions it handles.

If we look at the volume of transactions, we see something different. The number of online transactions is growing exponentially, even though the number of online stores is growing only linearly. So the number of transactions per online store is growing a lot faster than the number of online stores.

This is similar to the way the number of books published every year is growing much faster than the number of publishers.

The technical term for this is "network effects." It means that, as more people use something, the value that the network provides to each user increases. The more people in the network, the faster it grows.

But, just as the number of publishers has been growing exponentially, so, too, has the number of online stores.