2. Benefits of E-commerce
Global Marketplace
Global Marketplace is means that no matter where you are in the world you can
buy anything from the E-commerce site. But it is only a global marketplace once
people have started buying things from your website from all around the world
such as Amazon, eBay or Play.com.
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3. Benefits of E-commerce
24/7 Trading
24/7 Trading has numerous advantages like it doesn’t matter where you are in the
world you know that the store won’t be closed so you will be able to buy
something in case it is an emergency. And depending in the delivery option you
will be able to receive your order within that time limit.
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4. Benefits of E-commerce
Low Start -up & Running Costs
Running an online company makes the financial part of the start up a lot less
frustrating, because the costs will be a lot lower. It will also cost less for paying
workers because you will only need a few people to manager orders and packaging
etc.
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5. Benefits of E-commerce
Search Facilities
Having your company online makes it easier to find the product you are looking
for, instead of searching the whole store for one item. Having a good search bar
might actually bring customers back because of the customer service, this might
end up in people telling their friends about the site bringing more customers and
so on.
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6. Benefits of E-commerce
Fluid Pricing
Fluid pricing is very useful because it can allow you to make the prices what
you think is fair to what you think they should be, an example of this is to lower
the prices if orders are low to try and convince people to buy the item from you
instead of a competing company.
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7. Weaknesses of E-commerce
Consumer Trust
Building the customer trust can be a hard task, but an easy way to do this is by
always delivering what you say would do. Like allowing people to pre-order things
like games, or if anything goes wrong to go through with what ever you say you
would do to fix that problem. You could also take customer reviews about your
site and make changes to it to their specifications to make the site more user-
friendly.
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8. Weaknesses of E-commerce
Lack of Human Contact
The lack of human contact means that people might not go there quite as
much as a normal store even though it may be easier to find what your
looking for it makes people more isolated than going to the shops.
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9. Weaknesses of E-commerce
Product Description Problems
The problems with the description of products is that they can be un-true because
each individual product is different so your description of a product maybe overall
a good one but if someone else's has a certain problem they will probably write a
bad description.
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10. Weaknesses of E-commerce
Security issues
Security will always be a problem concerning buying things online, this is because
without the physical interaction between you and the actual process of buying
things people start to think that it isn’t as secure but the actual fact is it is safer.
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11. The Technology
Browsers
The browsers will make for an easy searching for a specific item so you don’t have to
go browsing through loads of things that won’t even be related to the item that you are
looking for. But if you are able to search for items that you want it will come up with
other items are related the search. Browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera,
Internet Explorer allow for you to do this and well as browsers on website to search
the site.
Web Authoring Software
Using authority software will allow you to have more control on what happens on
your site. This helps you with preventing viruses etc. on your site using this will help
your company because people will be wanting to go to your site because they know
it is a safe and secure site for buying products online.
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12. The Technology
Database systems
Database systems help with the transactions of the payments and keeping track of
all sales. A e-commerce site will have this if your able make an account and log in
and out to make it more secure.
IP addresses
The way the information reaches the right place is through the IP addresses, it is
the equivalent of a post code of your house. This helps the files you send off to
another computer for it to actually get there.
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13. The Technology
Domain Names
The domain name needs to be easy to remember because if it is it will help for
returning customers because if the domain name is long and complex then it will be
more likely to drive people away.
Multiple Domain Registration
Domain registrations are the end of the domain such as .gov .org or .com these are
some of the most common but there are only a limited amount of them which means
there is a limit to the amount of domains that can be made without it getting too
complex.
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14. The Technology
Ports & Protocols
The protocols is the way the computer react with each other and how the data is
transmitted, if the protocols aren’t same then each computer will not be able to react
and ‘talk’ to each other. But without the ports then there would be nothing connecting
the computers on the network together to be able to send data from one computer to
the next in the first place.
Browser & Platform Compatibility
Browser platforms are things like Firefox Google chrome or internet explorer.
When your website can be found on more than one browser then your target
audience will increase dramatically improving the traffic to your website.
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15. Promotion
Paying to be prominent in search engine results
When you do a search using Google it comes up with the most common used
sites and adds that are get there by paying to get right at the top so that they have
more chance of people going to your website so that you get more publicity.
The top websites aren’t always used the most, the spot’s go to the highest
bidders for publicity.
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16. Promotion
Newsgroups & Forums
Newsgroups and forums are commonly used as a free way of promoting your
company, the draw back is that you have virtually no control over what gets said
on these forums because people are free to say what ever you want to about the
specific topic. On the bright side you get to see the publics to thoughts about it
which can help with the deciding of how to improve it. The bad thing is you can get
people that go there just give you bad publicity.
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17. Promotion
Banners & Pop-ups
Banners are things that appear on your website and acts as an advert, they tend
to appear and the bottom of your window in the form of a strip with the
information about the website or product it’s promoting.
Pop-ups are similar except they open the actual website in another window for
you to close down, they are normally related to the website you are on but the
most common ones are the poker pop-ups trying to convince people to start
gambling.
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18. Promotion
Spam
Spam is a way of promoting yourself straight to the individual like Amazon do, but
a lot of people don’t count it as ‘spam’ because they don’t do it that often apart
form when new products come out that are related to the past searches you have
done. They also need you to have an account with them to have you e-mail to
send them in the first place.
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19. Promotion
Ensuring An Effective User Interface
Having an effective user interface can help with the promotion of your site by
bringing people back again and again without making them loose interest in your
site, which can lead them to tell friends and family about it then it will spread due to
an easy to use website.
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20. Promotion
Establishing Customer loyalty in a virtual environment
Establishing customer loyalty in a virtual environment can be very hard but once
you have it then it will be easy to keep if you keep up doing how you got it the first
place. It can be gained by always keep up your promises to your customers and
make surveys to see how and why they like using your site and how you could
make it better.
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21. Promotion
Site Names
Using other site names can help to promote your site for example you could say ‘The
closest site to Amazon than any other!’ This could improve traffic to your site
because it has been linked to the most visited e-commerce site on the internet. Most
people will go on it and then go off because it’s not what they are looking for, but
some people will stay to see how good it.
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22. Promotion
Direct Marketing
Using direct marketing you can get the right promotion to the right people depending
on what they have ordered and making the adverts related to those orders. This way
you aren’t wasting time trying to promote products on your site to the completely
wrong age group.
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23. Security
Hacking
Hacking is where people use software or coding to do more than the average user of
computers, for example if someone was hacking your site they would be able to
order whatever they want without having to pay by doing this it would make you
loose dramatic money.
Hacking Prevention
It is possible to prevent hacking like having security settings in place, you could also
make your site a secure payment site, this way you can prevent it because they would
have to go through the payment to get the product.
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24. Security
Viruses
Viruses are pieces of code that can infect your computer by downloading or visiting
certain sites that aren’t protected. There are numerous amount of sites that aren’t
safe but it is hard to know which ones are infected but there are ways to prevent any
of these things happening.
Virus Prevention
To prevent your computer from being infected you can get anti-virus software such as
AVG or MacAfee, these can also help you to not go on infected sites by showing you
a security level by the side of the hyperlink to the site, they look like red for bad
yellow/orange for ok and green for good a bit like a traffic light. They can scan your
computer for viruses that are already on there and destroy them before they do any
damage.
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25. Security
ID Theft
People may also be afraid of buying products online because of people finding their
information and using it to buy whatever they want. But buying products online is
actually safer than in shops but that is really hard to believe.
ID Theft Protection
You can help to prevent this by using sites that are security protected and/or paying
with PayPal which is the safest way to pay for things online.
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26. Security
Strong Passwords
Having a strong password is crucial to being more secure online because the harder
the password is to crack the less likely someone is to try. But if you can’t remember
the password then your done as well so you need a strong password that is easy to
remember. The easiest way to make a strong password is to include letter numbers
and punctuation. This will make the amount of possible codes increase by ten fold
and make it a lot harder to crack. This is because instead of just including all the
letter keys there are also the number keys which could be in any order with the letter
keys and then punctuation with it. This will make your information as secure as you
can get.
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