E-Commerce: A fresh approach to business

By Paul Taylor, Contributor

This is the first of a series of articles on e-commerce and its implications for the way business is conducted in the shipping industry and wider business community.

ADVANCES IN technology have opened up a new world informed by the advent of computers, improvements in communications technologies and the emergence of the Internet. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has introduced new means of buying goods and services, changed established distribution channels and opened new markets not hitherto conceived. Statistics show that commerce on the Internet will soar to more than 230 billion by 2001.

The Internet offers not only a means for conducting day-to-day business, but opportunities for generating revenue as well. Commercial uses of the Internet include:

On-line advertising

Direct marketing

On-line sales

Customer service

Value-added products

Subscription fees.

Although there is no universally accepted definition of e-commerce, it can be viewed as all commercial and financial transactions that take place over open networks. The definition purposefully has not been broadened to include all commercial and financial transactions taking place electronically, for example automated teller machines, or ATM machines. Neither is it restricted to only retail sales to customers over open networks. E-business can be divided into two broad categories. Business to business and business to customer, that is, e-retail.

E-Business

The predecessor to the Internet was Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) developed by the US. Department of Defence in the late 1960s. Originally, ARPAnet was an experimental network that initially linked scientists engaged in defence-related research. It was intended to link together different computers throughout the world.

ARPnet was launched with a mere four computers; today the Internet is the network of networks with hundreds of thousands of servers.

The Internet began to surge forward with the adoption of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), a standard set of rules that allows computers on different networks to communicate with one another.

Although often thought of as being synonymous with the World Wide Web, the Internet encompasses much more than just Web servers and hypertext documents. The Internet includes all of the computers that are linked to its various networks and all of the systems used to exchange information between those computers. Thus the growth of the Internet, and hence the development of e-commerce, is a ramification of the increase of the number of servers to the network, as well as increase in the number of users.

In the next article we will examine some of the major factors contributing to the growth in e-commerce in shipping and the wider business community as it relates to Jamaica.

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