Electronic commerce is a term broadly used to describe commercial transactions that are carried out with the help of computers and networks. The main advantages of electronic commerce are:

		Ability to reach global markets.
		Fast transaction and quick settlement.
		Higher volume due to automation.
		Low cost per transaction.
		Time saving and reduced personal involvement.
		Integration with commercial applications.

Hence we observe that these benefits are significant enough to offer your business a competitive edge and hence investments in systems and efforts to introduce electronic commerce will be rewarded. It is estimated that by the year 2002, 25% of the world's business will be transacted electronically over computers networks.

Your volume of online transactions will keep increasing. You will need a complete eBusiness solution to efficiently manage online sales and keep the customers happy. A complete eBusiness solution should cover Online Sales, Order Processing, Order Tracking, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Inventory Control, Supply Chain Management (SCM). The transparency of the NET will end the era of set prices and Auctions and Tenders will be more widely used. eBiz Millennium is one such integrated eBusiness solution that provides an express route for Business to eBusiness transformation.

Some of the most important information to a user of a commercial home page is: 

Price : Always be straight forward and make it easy to find your products. Describe the products that you are offering and provide quality pictures.  
Company : Tell the customer who you are. Make him or her comfortable with your company.  
Resources : Put links to other sites in your home page ( get permission from the people that maintain these pages ).  
Forms : Another important feature of home pages is their ability to support input forms. The results of these forms can be maintained in a database. The information that a company can collect through forms can take on many of the roles of the focus group.  
Customers can comment on their likes and dislikes of a product or service. The company can use this information to tailor its products to its customers needs. Due to its explosive growth and massive reach, Internet has become an important medium for Electronic commerce.  

While establishing its presence on the WWW, a company should consider five important factors.

1. Identify the audience :

Identify your audience and its likes/dislikes. The audience of your Internet site will determine the type of information that you place on the site and the form it will take. For example, you might discover a large number of complaints about sites that have too many pictures, but not enough information.

A company cannot just decide to go on-line. It must be willing to put the needed resources into an effort to make its use of the Internet successful. Once your presence is established on the WWW , your company, is easily accessible from anywhere through Internet. However, the Internet is very large with millions of WWW sites. Without a lot of visibility a company could sit on the Web and never be noticed. You can publish the uniform resource location or URL of your home page in your advertisements, stationary and visiting cards. Some of the ways to promote your home page or www site are submitting information to popular information retreival and search engines such as Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek etc. It is also advisable to submit an entry to the the International Network Information Centre or internic which is the central registry of the Internet.

If your company is offering consumer products, it is useful to have a storefront on some of the malls that have come up on the WWW. These malls will automatically attract large no. of visitors to your site. A company can take up a no. of storefronts in different malls which is similar to setting up a chain of retail shops. Another interesting strategy is to run contests and offer prizes to winners. This strategy can create a following of regular visitors if the contests are imaginative and innovative.

Once your site has been publicised, enquiries and orders will follow soon after. While conventional modes of payments may be acceptable to your company, typical Internet users would prefer a faster and more efficient method in keeping with the medium. More so, in the case of consumer goods where amounts may be quite small and do not justify the paperwork. Till a few months back, the security of financial transactions on Internet was doubted and majority of users refrained from providing credit card nos. on the Internet.

However now with the advent of secured servers with SSL and PGP encryption technology, it is possible to make payments using credit card without any major risk. In the near future expect to use digital cash and intelligent agents to regularly find information required by you and BicneT to provide you the services to assist to you make the best use of emerging technologies.