E- Commerce & IT Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

E- Commerce & IT - Essay Example Electronic Markets are the recent online trading network platform that links the sellers with the buyers together for exchanging goods and services, without any mandatory face to face interaction during spot trading. Most of the EMs are two-way networks or collaborative in nature. When different companies working in same line of business meet at a place, which are willing to exchange goods to target customers, we get an association of market places. Such market place is called the electronic market if the parties to transaction mainly communicate online or through some private networks.The concept of EM has its origin from Electronic commerce, the fundamental purpose of which is to execute transactions that are supported electronically. Some of the top e-commerce developments of last decades include eBay, Amazon, Google Ad Words, PayPal, etc. The business model may be B2B, B2C, or C2C. In all these models, automating transactions drastically reduces the amount of paper works and need for human intervention which consequently leads to minimization of overall cost of the firms (Andreini, 2003, pp.15-16). Any transaction involves the exchange of goods and services and the electronic medium is used to keep record of such transactions, such as inventory, track location of goods despatched, quantity, price, etc. Online transactions that take place at the point of sale need to critically focus on time sensitive transactions whose delay might cause huge losses for companies (Huang, Wolf, and Sycara, 2001, pp. 2-9). The evolution of internet increased the speed of data transfer and, hence, provided an ideal platform for conducting EDI (Electronic data Interchange) transaction and E-commerce. Challenges for the Collaborative Electronic Markets When any business plans to launch the Electronic market, its main objective is to bring the buyers and sellers together through a network by realising a need for exchange of goods. But such a business model can sustain in the long run only if there is sufficient trust among the business partners on the entire system. Not to mention that security, reliability and privacy is a must for any sort of online transaction. These issues must be addressed very seriously if the company is planning to sustain (Wielki, 2002, p.129). The Electronic market has huge scope form demand planning, analysing and forecasting, to supply chain management, logistics and demand fulfilment. The business partners do not only look for cost efficiency but also expect specialization from Electronic Market companies (Furrenr and Sudharshan, 2001, p.127). The cost consideration has to be taken into account along with the timely delivery. This is because very often it is found that carrying goods for third party reduces direct cost per kilometre of running the trucks for the companies but at the same time it increases time of delivery by spending significant amount time on roads. Many e-Markets have only focused on the cost aspect ignoring th e time which ultimately lead to their downfall. Very often the larger-than-life ambition, lack of clearly defined long term goals, distrust among partners, reluctance of the suppliers to join common platform also lead to failure of e-business models (Gupta, 2007, p.4). In order for the e-commerce companies to sustain in the competitive market, it needs to specialize on a particular field and then expand the business gradually with time. Thus, the mentality of entrepreneurs of trying to achieve ‘too much’ in ‘less time’ may ultimately take their ship down and shorten their long term sustainability. Managing Conflicts in e-Marketplace The emergence of Electronic Marketplace has lead