How is E-Commerce Helpful to the Consumer?

In B2C transactions. Customers/Consumers are given more influence over what and how products are made and how services are delivered, there by broadening consumer choices. E-commerce allows for a faster and more open process, with customers having greater control.

 

E-Commerce makes information on products and the market as a whole readily available and accessible and increases price transparency, which enable customers to make more appropriate purchasing decisions.

E- commerce transforms old economy relationships to new economy relationships characterized by end-to-end relationships management solutions.

 

Electronic Payment System

An electronic payment system (EPS) is a system of financial exchange between buyers and sellers in the online environmental that is facilitated by a digital financial instrument (such as encrypted credit card numbers, electronic checks, or digital cash) backed by a bank, an intermediary, or by leyel tender.

 

EPS plays an important role in e-commerce because is closes the e-commerce loop. In developing countries, the undeveloped electronic payments system is a serious impediment to the growth of e-commerce. In these countries, entrepreneurs are not able to accept credit card payments over the internet due to legal and business concerns. The primary issue is transaction security.

The absence or inadequacy of legal infrastructures governing the operations of e-payments is also a concern. Hence banks with e-banking operations employ service agreements between themselves and their clients.

The relatively undeveloped credit card industry in many developing countries is also a barrier to e-commerce. Only a small segment of the population can buy goods and services over the internet due to the small credit card market base. There is also the problem of the requirement of "explicit consent" (i.e. a signature) by a card owner before a transaction is considered valid-a requirement that does not exist in the U.S and in other developed countries.

Security In E-commerce

While many security issues in e-commerce are the same as general security issues, some of them specific for the kind of software used by e-commerce businesses, data bases, in particular database which are accessed remotely, online forms, and shopping cards. Below we consider these specific vulnerabilities as well as more general ones.

SSL: SSL allows to transfer data in an encrypted form. All information that a customer might want to keep private should be transmitted via SSL. Such information should definitely include credit card number and related information and may, depending on the type of business, include customer's name, address, and the list of products that the customer is buying. It should also include the customer's password and order ID.

SSL connection (i.e. connection via https, instead of http) should be the default for transmitting customer's information. However, it is often not the default protocol on many e-commercial web sites. The reason why many businesses don't use SSL as default is because SSL connection is slower than a regular http connection (due to encryption and decryption) e Bay has been criticized recently for transmitting passwords in the clear rather than encrypted.

While many technologies can fit within the definition of "electronic commerce", the most important are:

- Electronic data interchange (EDI)

- Bar Codes

- Electronic mail

- Internet

- World wide web

- Product data exchange