E-COMMERCE
E-commerce is perhaps the most widely acclaimed buzzword, which
gained popularity even aftermath of so-called dot com boom and diffusion. Every
business aspect was being viewed with identifying business opportunities with
the active support of IT tools especially Internet. Though various business
models evolved and still the process of finding the most suitable model for
different business propositions is continuing, the impact of e commerce
practices can be felt and acknowledged without any reservations. However this
impact is varied across different nations due to their characteristic
differences in economies. The trends in e commerce practices show that it will
gain the requisite volume with the pace of IT revolution as seen across the
world. This is a brief description of modern practices and emerging trends related
to technology, design and security issues involved in e-commerce.
Wireless Internet
Major technology and business companies such as Microsoft, AOL
and Amazon.com are in the lead in developing and marketing wireless
communications services and products required for facilitating business through
wireless internet. AOL wants to make instant messaging available to all its
customers and Amazon is already selling books using palm pilots. WAP (wireless
application protocol) will be developed for use for wireless pages, instead of
HTML.
Portals
Portals are sites that combine a portfolio of basic content,
communication, and commerce sites. For the most part, they started out as
search engines. There are two different types of portals in use, broad-based
portals i.e. sites that serve everyone. They include Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Excite, Snap, Lycos, AltaVista,
Look Smart, About.com, Juno, Earthlink, etc. Vertical portals are the sites
that focus on a particular content category, commerce opportunity, or audience
segment, with a broad set of services. Examples of such portals include CBS
Sports line, Garden.com, eBay, Amazon.com, Blue Mountain Arts, CNET, etc.
