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> ---vinayak doddihal <doddihal -at- HOTMAIL -dot- COM> wrote:
> >
> > I work for a telecommunications service providing company as a senior
> > technical writer. My company wants to start a new service e-commerce for
> > which we are supposed to make a presentation covering what is it, the
> > scope, its scenario in US and European market, related security aspects,
> > etc. We are totally blank about the same. Could anyone has information
> > on this? I tried to get info from net but could not succeed.
Some of the best overall information on ecommerce is on the Netscape site.
Microsoft also has some good stuff. In both cases, once you get to their
sites, search for ecommerce and keep looking for variations on the term.
There are also dozens of articles in business and computer magazines about
instances of successful ecommerce sites - the most often mentioned one probably
being the amazon.com site.
Generally:
What is ecommerce? It's electronic commerce, i.e., business transactions done
electronically instead of face-to-face. The usual medium is a secure web site,
but the scope covers everything from online 'malls' where you can shop for
everything from lingerie to luxury cars, books and CDs to balloon rides, 30 or
more varieties of hot sauce (I found one shop that specializes in
amusingly-named hot sauces) to toasty anoraks. You can do online banking,
online purchase/sale of stocks and bonds, online tours of homes for sale, and
most kinds of commerce that you do offline. I don't know what you mean by "its
scenario in US and European market," but since the web is globally available, I
assume that any page shown on a desktop in the US looks pretty much the same in
Europe, although many sites have localization options to account for different
languages. Most sites working with credit cards have incorporated security
modules that encrypt or otherwise protect credit card data.
The predictions for this year are that ecommerce will generate in excess of
$1Billion US in revenue. One of the remarks made in the IBM commercial about
ecommerce is that every $1 invested in the site will generate $2 by the end of
the year, and that's a very conservative estimate for most sites.
Mind you, what I've stated is what anybody could cull from various news
articles. Further research will probably net you lots of statistics to back up
what I've said.
