E-Commerce Business Strategic Management

Introduction

The way people do business today is changing faster and faster from physical to digital, supporting the growth of Electronic Commerce.

Electronic Commerce commonly known as e-commerce is the process of buying, selling, transferring, serving, or exchanging products, services, or information via computer networks, including the Internet (Turban and Volonino 2009, p. 199). Businesses implementing the pure brick and motar (traditional commerce) are getting scarcer and scarcer as many businesses in the digital age are shifting to click and motar (Combination of traditional commerce and electronic commerce such as a store or a bank and a website). This change is motivated by the numerous advantages presented by electronic commerce developments.

The purpose of this report is to present electronic commerce. This will be done by determining the latest electronic commerce developments, presenting the main types of e-commerce, describing the electronic commerce process, enumerating the principal payment systems for electronic commerce, and finally presenting SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of e-commerce.

I. Latest electronic commerce developments

1. Business transformation

We are living in a world of increasing complexity and uncertainty. Our businesses are under constant threat from global forces. The business models that worked and created value for a business in the past are no longer valid. If we look back 20 years, we will see that there are very few businesses around doing the same things the same way. Either they do things differently or they are doing different things (Bititci, 2007). In the new economic climate we need to find innovative ways of restructuring our competitive basis, which means we need to transform our businesses.

The first trend of electronic