Discuss how E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees's empowerment and facilitate customer support.

E-commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support.

An important aspect of business efficiency is the cycle time which is the total time that it takes to complete a recurring task that usually important to the business's output. An example in e-commerce field would be the total time spent by receiving an order from customer preparing invoices or receipts, preparing product, delivering process and transaction. Task may be repeated thousands or millions of times.

E-commerce allows people to carry out businesses without the barriers of time or distance. The examples are Dell and FED-EX. It might be day or night, 24-hours a day, purchase or sell anything at a single click of the mouse. The benefits of e-commerce consumers are providing them convenience, high speed, low cost, desired customization, personalization and communities. This would certainly reduce the time cycle process.

E-commerce brings organization and customers more closely. It benefits organizations via expanding the marketplace, creating a cost savings, improving business process and promoting interactivity. It also benefits society by improving the standard of living and delivering of public services.

Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behaves, take action, and control work and decision making in independent ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one's providence.

The most important perspective employees’ empowerment in e-commerce is the ability to make decision for customers. Employees are able to improve employees’ empowerment by giving more flexibility to access information such as internet, intranet, EDI and other access to global regulations and latest information. The employees will have sufficient alertness of the complaints and are able to handle the complaints immediately and efficiently. Therefore, employees will have no problem convincing customers to stay with the services provided.


E-commerce also can facilitate customer support because it provides unlimited shopping hours for customers to place their order as it is run on a 24 hours basis. E-commerce facilitates customer support by providing a wide range of technological solutions and communication opportunities. The core of customer service is retaining customers through satisfying their needs. By enabling customers to find detailed information online, customer service can be greatly improved. The objective in customer service is satisfying their needs for example managing customer’s feedback, complaints, and recommendation is necessary in enhancing customers support.

An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

Starting in year 1999, many EC companies, especially e-tailing and business-to-business ones, began to fail. Well-known business-to-consumer failures include eToys, MarchFirst, and Webvan.com. Well-known business-to-business failures include Chemdex.com, Ventro.com, and Verticalnet.com. A survey by Strategic Direction (2005) found that 62 percent of dot-coms lacked financial skills and 50 percent had little experience with marketing. Similarly, a large number of companies failed to ensure they had the inventory and distribution setup to meet initial demand. The large number of failures does not absolutely mean that EC’s days are numbered. The dot.com failure rate is declining sharply (Rovenpor 2003).

Pets.com is one amongst many other online retailers that failed as a business-to-consumer EC entity. Pets.com was a short-lived online business that sold pet accessories and supplies direct to consumers over the World Wide Web. Pets.com failed as the online bubble began to burst in mid-2000. The strategic cause evolved from decision making that determined the objectives, resources, and policies of the organization is the poor business model. The absence of sound business strategies will lead to this outcome and cause the lost of declared business benefits. Pets.com’s business model was ordinary thus did not offer consumers something unique from the other online pet supplies retailers. Moreover, Pets.com entered a market of selling low-margin food and supplies that have high shipping cost. Therefore, shopping online for such items is less convenient if compared to shopping at an actual retail store.

Failure of dot.com may not be attributed to a single factor, but to a combination of factors. The above findings demonstrate that poor or non-existent business plans and failure to meet customer expectations that causes dot.com failures. In light of the venture capital situation after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the Pets.com management and board realized that they would not be able to raise further capital. At last, they made decision to sell off the business.

An example of an E-commerce success and its causes

An example of an E-commerce success is eBay. EBay is the world's largest online trading community. It is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping web sites where people and businesses buy and sell goods and services in the worldwide. Besides its original U.S. web site, eBay has established localized web sites in other thirty countries.

There are many causes of success such as connection, experience of bargaining and building membership.

Connection enables individuals to connect and interact with one another. It can involve in market solutions, collaboration and wisdom of crowds. It also allows people to connect with some special early childhood memories. It could be anything from collecting baseball cards to toy soldiers to Barbie dolls to doll houses, and so forth. It also allows people to make that connection and relive a lot of those very vivid and very fond memories that they have from an earlier period of time.

People enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar, the hunt and looking around for merchandise. The other component is that they really enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain in some way and likes to haggle a little bit over the price. EBay auction format allows users to do that. The other thing is it has became a very practical place to buy and sell collectibles or commodities.

When compare eBay to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, eBay has done very little external promotion to build membership. EBay is a unique community that able to build membership through the word-of-mouth of users and also attract new members due to the amount of media attention. EBay is the first example where a commerce site has actually been built around a community where people are exchanging information, goods, services and merchandise. It's changed people because we have our share of hobbyists and collectors, but we have also learned that people who have established additional brick-and-mortar businesses are slowly moving a lot of that business over to eBay.

The history and evolution of E-commerce

Before e-commerce has been introduced, business has made by face-to-face or via letters. Later on, it is modernized by the technology to the usage of telephone, telegraph and even fax machine to deal with their clients.

The basic e-commerce plan is electronic data interchange (EDI) and electronic funds transfer (EFT) have been invented. These methods were introduced in the late 1970s. These allow businesses to speed up the process by sending commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices, electronically. As the time goes by, EDI and EFT have created the expansion and acceptance of credit cards, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking.

The examples of the growth in e-commerce are the airline reservation system and the online shopping system which were invented in UK in 1979 by Micheal Aldrich.

During the 1980s, automobile manufacturers such as Ford, Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan started adopting e-commerce and in 10 years time, e-commerce has included theories like enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.

The example of a successful company who first use e-commerce is Boston Computer Exchange. It was first created in 1982 and the company dominated electronic trading in used computers in the US in the 1980s.

These are some of the achievement in the history of e-commerce:

• Year 1994, Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its webpage, the first online bank opened and etc.
• Year 1995, Amazon.com was launched and companies like Dell and Cisco began to use internet for commercial transactions aggressively.
• Year 1998, electronic postal stamps could be purchased and downloaded for printing in from the web.
• Year 1999, peer-to-peer file sharing software Napster launched.
• Year 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.
• Year 2003, Amazon.com posted first yearly profit.
• Year 2008, US e-commerce and online retail sales projected to reach $204 billion, an increasing of 17% over 2007.

In time, e-commerce is still widely growing and will be more successful in the future.

One and only Chin Chee Yen

My name is Chin Chee Yen, a 23-year-old girl from Ipoh, a town which full of delicious food and unique caves. I joined Utar since three years ago and I have made many new friends that come from different places such as Petaling Jaya, Johor, Malacca and Sarawak. Now, I am studying Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) Accounting in Utar. Yet, I wish I can also involve in management area besides accounting area in future.

My hobbies are reading novels and playing puzzle games. Currently, reading English novel is one of my favorite activities thus I believe it can improve my language and skills. Occasionally, I will spend a little of my time in swimming.

The websites that I most visited are http://www.yahoo.com/, http://www.friendster.com/, http://www.hotmail.com/, http://www.youtube.com/ and http://www.google.com/. I usually search my assignment information through Yahoo and Google, but Google provide more details and professional info than Yahoo. Yahoo mail is better than Hotmail because Yahoo mail is faster and the steps to send mail are clearer and easier, compared to Hotmail. Even though we not always meet each other, I can still easily keep on updating my friends' profile and their live through friendster website.

I usually will use the Internet to do assignment and presentation for searching photos, video clips, music, pictures, and data.

Two months ago, I had accessed to the Internet to buy shirt. This was the only time I buy shirt through online but the quality and pattern of shirt were much difference from seeing the picture in the webpage and the price was not cheap. However, this is a good experience so I can know how to buy things through online for the next time. Besides that, I had tried once before paying Utar fees through online by Public Bank Electronic service. I found that it is more convenient and faster than pay bill through counter in bank. It saves me a lot of time and can avoid traffic jam during peak time.

I often use MSN for chatting. It can meet many people from different places and it is free. I also discuss assignment through MSN instead of having face-to-face discussion because it is convenience for those members who stay far from the University.

This is Ong Lee Ming... Read it, Love it, Embrace it...

I am Ong Lee Ming, a 20-years-old girl who enjoys much on eating. That reason is, having a pleasing flavor make me in cheerful mood a whole day. In other way, sweet course, as of pastry, ice-cream or candy, served to reduce tension for me.

I was born on July 2, having the characteristics of Cancer. Moody, touchy-feely and imaginative, these three fit me best. Everyone has one thing or another they would like to change about themselves. Currently living my life, I would be more satisfied if I could change my impulsivity.

The top 5 websites that I visited the most are www.utar.edu.my, www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.hotmail.com, and www.2decoratecakes.com. Through UTAR website, I would able to get the information about my course easily and conveniently (example timetable). Google and yahoo websites are the search engine for me while doing research and/or assignment. I would like to visit hotmail website for checking mail purpose. The 2decoratecakes website is where I can get the updated information about my favorite visiting shop.

The top 5 Internet activities for me include chatting with people using Window Live Messenger, downloading short video, uploading attractive photos, searching information, and surfing news web.

That’s all about me. Thank you for reading my profile. Hope enjoyed it.

Me... Khoo Kean Hong~ (^w^)

My name is Khoo Kean Hong, and I'm currently 20 years old. I was born on September 26, 1988 in Kuala Lumpur. I have moved several times within Kuala Lumpur due to my parent's work.

For my interest, I'm particularly interested in online gaming. I have played assorted online game on massively multiplayer online role playing game or known as mmorpg. The examples of these games is Ragnarok Online, maplestory, fly for fun, trickster online and etc. The game that I'm currently kept on playing is maplestory. This is because there is always an updating on the game which provides players with new experience on the game itself. For those who are interested to join me in maplestory can kindly visit http://www.maplesea.com/ for the Malaysia and Singapore server.


On the other hand, I’m also interested in watching reality competition series. There is a lot of competition that I have watched. For example, Survivor, America's next top model, So you think you can dance, Million of stars and etc. The reality series which I find the most interesting is Survivor. There are 17 season of Survivor that have been released and I'm currently waiting for the 18th season which is to be released in February. The reason I like to watch Survivor is because apart of the human manipulation and the events that might have happen in the game itself, I get to see some breath taking places that I have never seen before, not even from discovery channel. For example, on the previous season, Survivor Gabon, Earth Last Eden, this is a place that have not been influenced by the world's advancement in technology and the animal still have their original personality in living habitat. This place is not to be accessed by visitor unless they have authorization from the department of Africa, which is why I can only view the place by watching on Survivor Gabon.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc7OHNyu-1k (Sneak Peak)

One of the top 5 websites that i visited the most is http://www.maplesea.com/ The reason is I'm playing the game, thus I can check on the updating about the game whether there is new event or game news. The next website that i frequently visit is http://www.yahoo.com/ This website is to check the mail I received and also as a search engine for my assignment or information that I needed. The 3rd top website will be http://www.youtube.com/ This website provides video for user to view, I can watch the show that I wanted to without downloading the show. The next website is http://www.mininova.org/ There is a lot of download torrent in this website that include books, games, songs, shows, and etc. Lastly, the website that I frequently visit is http://www.facebook.com/ I can catch up with my friends via this website, upload pictures on my current event and check out people's pictures that have been uploaded.

That is some information about me, and without more gibberish talk. I will end this entry, thanks for reading.

This is our BLOG!!!

Welcome to the e-commerce web log or known as blog, that is created by INDEX. First of all, thank you for visiting this blog. To set up the blog, let’s the group members have self-introduction first. This group consists of three members, Ms.Chin Chee Yen, Mr.Khoo Kean Hong and Ms.Ong Lee Ming.

We are students that pursuing our studies in Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman taken on Bachelor of Commerce (HONS) Accounting.

The main purpose we create this blog is for the assignment that given to us. Through this assignment, we can learn more about e-commerce as the content of this blog includes updating information about e-commerce. According to Turban, E., e-commerce defined as the process of buying, selling or exchanging products, services and information via computer networks. The business application of e-commerce is a good plan if the internet technology keeps on growing. This will attract more organisations to adopt e-commerce in their business. Currently, the broadband service enhances convenience for users to access the internet. Thus, the business income of the organisation can be increased.

After a simple introduction about e-commerce, we hope that you will keep on viewing on our blog with our weekly update on relevant e-commerce topics.