Home » Languages » English (Sr. Secondary) » Essay on “E-Commerce : Electronic Commerce ” Complete Essay for Class 9, Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Essay on “E-Commerce : Electronic Commerce ” Complete Essay for Class 9, Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

E-Commerce : Electronic Commerce :

E-Commerce an abbreviation for electronic commerce, usually defined as the conduct of business on-line, via the Internet. Until recently, e-commerce was limited mainly to large companies and their suppliers, who connected their computers together to speed up ordering and payment systems. Today, millions of people are involved in e-commerce on the Internet—when, for example, they visit World Wide Web sites to buy books or CDs, order flowers or pizzas, or check their bank accounts.

Initially, the Internet was designed to be used by government and, academic users, but now it is rapidly becoming commercialized. It has on-line “shops”, even electronic “shopping malls”. Customers, browsing at their computers, can view products,  read descriptions, and sometimes even try samples. What they lack is the means to buy from their keyboard, on impulse. They could pay by credit card, transmitting the necessary data by modem; but intercepting messages on the Internet is trivially easy for a smart hacker, so sending a credit-card number in an unscrambled message is inviting trouble. It would be relatively safe to send a credit card number encrypted with a hard-to-break code. That would require either a general adoption across the Internet of standard encoding protocols, or the making of prior arrangements between buyers and sellers. Both consumers and merchants courd see a windfall if these problems are solved. For merchants, a secure and easily divisible supply of electronic money will motivate more Internet surfers to become on-line shoppers. Electronic money will also make it easier for smaller business to achieve a level of automation already enjoyed by many large corporations.

We need to resolve four key technology issues before consumers and merchants anoint electric money with the same real and perceived values as our tangible bills and coins. These four key areas are: Security, Authentication, Anonymity, and Divisibility. Encryption may help make the electric money more secure, but we also need guarantees that no one alters the data—most notably the denomination of the currency—at either end of the transaction. One form of verification is secure hash algorithms, which represent a large file of multiple megabytes with a relatively short number consisting of a few hundred bits. We use the surrogate file—whose smaller size saves computing time—to verify the integrity of a larger block of data. Hash algorithms work similarly to the checksums used in communications protocols: The sender adds up all the bytes in a data packet and appends the sum to the packet. The recipient performs the same calculation and compares the two sums to make sure everything arrived correctly.

The component of the electronic-currency infrastructure is anonymity—the ability to buy and sell as we please without threatening our fundamental freedom of privacy. If unchecked, all our transactions, as well as analyses of our spending habits, could eventually reside on the corporate databases of individual companies or in central clearinghouses, like those that now track our credit histories. Serial numbers offer the greatest opportunity for broadcasting our spending habits to the outside world. Today’s paper money floats so freely throughout the economy that serial numbers reveal nothing about our spending habits. But a company that mints an electric dollar could keep a database of serial numbers that records who spent the currency and what the dollars purchased. It is then important to build a degree of anonymity into electric money. Yet another technical component in the evolution of electric money is flexibility. Everything may work fine if transactions use nice round dollar amounts, but that changes when a company sells information for a few cents or even fractions of cents per page, a business model that’s evolving on the Internet. Electric-money systems must be able to handle high volume at a marginal cost per transaction. Security, authentication, anonymity, and divisibility all have developers working to produce the collective answers that may open the floodgates to electronic commerce in the near future. The fact is that the electric-money genie is already out of the bottle. The market will demand electric money because of the accompanying new efficiencies that will shave costs in both consumer and supplier transactions. Consumers everywhere will want the bounty of a global marketplace, not one that’s tied to bankers’ hours. These efficiencies will push developers to overcome today’s technical hurdles, allowing bits to replace paper as our most trusted medium of exchange.

The key question, then, in describing a transaction as an example of e-commerce is not which communications system is used, but whether or not the transaction has been automated. With a telephone-based bank account, for example, a user may wish to make a payment via the telephone. If a human assistant takes the instruction and types it into the bank’s computer, that cannot be described as e-commerce. However, if the call is answered by a speech recognition system (software running on a computer), which verifies the user’s identity and makes the payment without human involvement, that is e-commerce. Much e-commerce may soon be performed using a mixture of voice recognition and text messaging from mobile telephones.

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