E – COMMERCE

                 

The internet was open to commercial use in 1991. Since then, thousands of businesses have set up shop at web site. One of the most popular activities on the web site today is shopping. Online shopping has the same allure as catalogs you can shop at your leisure, anonymously, and in pajamas. But the economics of the web provide opportunities that go beyond retails catalogs. Even small business and individual artists can post web pages that display their wares.

What is e-commerce?

E-commerce as internet activities include, online shopping, online banking, online stock trading and electronic auctions. E-commerce is typically refers to business transactions that are conducted electronically over a computer network it encompasses all aspects of business and marketing processes enable by internet and web technologies.

E-commerce wares include many kinds of physical products, digital product and services. Physical product at e-commerce sites include such goods as clothing, shoes, skateboards, and car. Most of these products can be shipped to buyers through the postal service or a parcel delivery service.

Increasingly, e-commerce goods include digital products, such as news music video, database, software and all types of knowledge – based items. The unique feature of these products is that they can be transformed into bits and delivered over the web. Consumers can get them immediately upon completing their other orders, and no one pays shipping costs.

E-commerce merchants also peddle services, such as arranging trips, online medical consultation, and distance education. Some of these services can be carried out by computers. Others requires human agents. Services can be delivered electronically, as in the case of distance learning, or they might produce some physical product such as a cruise ship ticket.

Most of the e-commerce activities web surfers enjoy are classified as B2C (Business-to-consumer) e-commerce. In the B2c model, businesses supply goods and services to individual consumers. In the C2C (consumer-to-consumer) model, consumers sell to each other. This model includes wildly popular online auctions rummage sales. B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce involves one enterprise buying goods or services from another enterprise. B2C (business-to-government) e-commerce aims to help businesses sell to governments.

HOW PROFITABLE IS E-COMMERCE?

E-commerce enhances traditional business modes by offering efficiency and opportunities for automation, computerization, and digitization. One of the benefits of e-commerce is it’s ability to increase profit margins by cutting costs. A hotel reservation made online cost the innkeeper 80% less than a booking made by phone.

Another benefit is that e-commerce merchants also gain income by hosting advertising space for marketers, who are creating increasingly hard-to-avoid styles of online advertisements, such as banner and pop-up ads.

What is pop - up ads?

A banner ad is an advertisement, typically embedded at the top of a web page. While a pop-up ad is an advertisement that appear in the separate window when you connect to a web page. Both banner ad and pop-up ad are a way of advertising product, goods and services online e.g. web/blog, adsense, website sales. When these banner ad or pop-up ad is click, your browser connect you directly to the advertiser web site, where you can find more information about the product and then make a purchase.

          Through banner and pop-up ad, hosting merchants earn revenue based on the click-through rate. This depend on the number of times that site visitors click the ad to connect to the advertiser web site. The hosting merchant is paid a small fee for each click-through. This is a means of earning money online. Here is where traffic comes in, if you have ever done business online before especially that relating to advertising, marketing and affiliate, you won’t be skeptic that getting traffic is one of the problems every hosting merchants face. It easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful bog with significant traffic. Traffic is simply the people that coming to your website business, people who patronize you business, those who visit your business or website either online or offline, those visitors that click and ad to connect to the advertiser website. They  are the one you are hoping to convert to make your sales and profits. Without these no business on the planet can survive. Serious online hosing merchant take it seriously.