How E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support

In the business environment, traditionally there is a need for a tangible and permanent form of communication in a transaction between buyer and seller. However, in e-commerce there is the ability to communicate in an electronic form where a computer is able to recognize, reproduce and store means that business could now be conducted in a paperless environment. Electronic commerce is the process of trading across the Internet, that is, a buyer visits a seller's website and makes a transaction there.


E-commerce eliminates the traditional purchase approach, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Issuing purchase orders, obtaining multilevel approvals and tracing invoices can lead to high transaction costs.

Internet procurement automates this process and helps companies increase the speed and reduce the cost of purchasing transactions. Orders will be placed electronically and the product will be produced and shipped out without the cost of middlemen. Perhaps most importantly, order status and inventory levels could be made available to both the seller and its customers. This should relieve the sales and customer-service departments of phone calls and e-mails to track orders and verify inventory levels.

Cyber space can be an outstanding way to nurture the business revenue base.Customers can reach a company on the Internet globally for 24 hours. It creates new markets and segments, allow customers to make wise purchasing decisions and increases business competitiveness.



E-commerce would provide consumers with benefits such as interactive communications, fast delivery, and more customization that would only be available for consumers through online shopping. Product information in the Internet is more compact and it ranges from various sites. Users have more opportunity to choose and compare products they want to purchase or easily find and select specialized products.


Progressive leaders, such as those in many high-tech firms and Internet companies are less likely than traditional leaders to give specific instructions to employees. Rather, they’re more likely to empower employees to make decisions on their own. Empowerment means giving employees the authority (the right to make a decision without consulting the manager) and responsibility (the requirement to accept the consequences of one’s actions) to respond quickly to customer.


The increasing use of computer to do routine tasks has shifted the kinds of skills needed for employees in the e-commerce industry. Employees are giving power to handle a variety of responsibilities, interact with customer and think creatively.


While the growth of the Internet is opening up new opportunities for e-commerce, however the limited understanding of e-commerce technology may leads to the cause of failure for the firms which start implementing doing their business online.


Useful links:

1) eCommerce-eBusiness Cost-Benefit

2) NetSuite-eCommerce Companies

An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes:PAYPAL

Happy chinese new year once again!happy ox year!Back to business,do you know what's PayPal?Although its not that popular or well-known in Malaysia, PayPal has been steadily established itself as one of the most successful e-commerce website.

Basically, PayPal is an e-commerce business that allows payments and money being transfer via the Internet. Moreover, it also serves an alternative to the traditional paper methods such as cheques and money orders.Paypal performs payments or transactions processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other corporate users, for which it charges a fee. Well, it sometimes does charges a transaction fee for receiving money, i.e. a % of the amount sent plus an additional fixed amount.

Paypal succeeded as an e-commerce business is mainly because of its safety and security where its provide a strong control in identifying the online theft and phishing. Besides that, Paypal also provides a security key which enhance the layer of security. Thus, make the user accounts to be more resistant to intrusion and it's easy to use.In addition, it's free to sign up for PayPal account to send money to friends and family.

Users also can transfer their money from their bank account to PayPal account at no charge. PayPal transaction fees for Premier and Business accounts, is considerably low. For instance, if monthly sales is between $ 0.00U SD to $3,000.00 USD, then the price of per transaction is only $0.30USD plus 3.9%.Paypal also enable the users to make payment without exposing credit card nor account numbers to the merchant. Thus, provide 100% protection for unauthorized payments. Moreover, provides 24/7 monitoring to prevent fraud.

For all these reasons, PayPal has been successfully in e-commerce world.

Useful links:
1) About PayPal

2) PayPal Security Center

3) PayPal-Nonprofit Success Stories

An example of an E-Commerce failure and its causes

Success of some companies in doing e-commerce might lighten up your interest, just like many companies do.

In fact, making money online may be harder than earning from business offline, many companies failed in e-commerce make us realize that selling on the Internet is not as easy as it was portrayed to be.

Webvan(1999-2001)
Webvan is one of the failure examples and was hailed as Number One in the "Top10 dot-com flop" by CNET in June 2008 .

May be you can get some ideas about what was the company doing? Web and Van...? You're right, it actually did online grocery business and operated in term of online "credit and delivery", with the promise of delivering products to customers' home within a 30-minutes window of their choosing.

Webvan was founded by Louis Borders in the late 1990s, which was the period of dot-com boom and set the headquater in Foster City, California, USA. Other investors included Goldman Sachs and Yahoo, who encouraged it to rapidly build its own infrastructure. At Webvan's peak, it offered service in 10 cities in USA. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities, however, it eventually went for bankruptcy in July 2007.

Why Bankruptcy??
Webvan's spokesman, Bud Grebey, said that the shut down of Webvan.com is caused by the change of delivery fees, bad press over former CEO, George Shaheen, and the critical auditor's report.

However, there are some main causes that led to bankruptcy, firstly, it is believed that Webvan overspent on infrastructure, it far exceeded sales growth!

Secondly,Webvan failed in realizing the promise as delivery within 30 minutes. The delivery was late sometimes affected the customer satisfaction.

Thirdly, the problem came from management level, because there was no any senior executive had any management experience in the supermaket industry, including its CEO!

Lastly,Webvan had grown too fast, it expanded to 26 cities within a 2-3 years time. It had not attracted enough customers to justify its spending.

In conclusion, E-Commerce may help company in doing business with more creative and easier ways.However, there always might be some portion of companies can get success in the E-Commerce, it must associate with appropriate strategies and planning.
Knows the causes of failure, prevents it from ruining the business!

Useful Links:

1) Why Webvan Droff Off a Cliff

2) Top10 dot-com flop

3) Success and Failure of Pure-Play Organizations: Webvan vs Peapod

An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes

Happy Chinese New Year to all my friends~!!

Since chinese new year is around, lets talk something good, for example, the success of an E-commerce, but not failure. haha!!


E-commerce allows people to create completely new business models.
Internet is a very powerful communication tool in trade. It is faster and more efficient because trader can reduce operational cost as well as transaction and delivery time, and that is why more and more e-commerce is emerging. Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably heard about e-commerce.





One of the examples of success e-commerce is Lelong.com.my. Styled and functioning similar to the international auction site, eBay.com, Lelong.com.my powers a strong and secure avenue for trading in Malaysia. The idea of an auction site in Malaysia has taken off with huge response. Starting based on Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) transactions, Lelong.com.my is now moving to becoming a channel for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) relationships. Many distributors have realized the power of using the auction system and are now using Lelong.com.my to trade and grow their business.

Many of us have lots of items lying around the house that are not currently in use; whether second hand or new items that we have not gotten around to disposing of. This is a major factor that has brought many users to Lelong.com.my. According to the introduction of lelong.com.my, approximately 70% of all items posted for auction on their site are sold.

Besides that, Lelong website is also focus heavily on customer support and in the event of any problems or queries arising, any e-mails / phone calls are responded to almost instantaneously. Problems that arise can also be posted in the forum and many users play a major role in replying and helping out others. With all their on-going efforts, a community of auction users has formed which are extremely diverse, and who actively interact among one another. This causes them to feel at home and comfortable trading with other members. And this is the reason why lelong.com.my is always be the first choice of people when they are try to buy or sell something online.

Lelong.com.my is one of the major shopping and reliable website in Malaysia, it makes Malaysia market more variable. Other than traditional way to make transaction, lelong.com.my provide another platform for doing the transaction. Thus, if u are attending to commence an e-commerce, perhaps, u can takes lelong.com.my as your reference.

The History and Evolution of E-Commerce

Hi guys! Today, i would like to share a very interesting fact with all of you. I guess most of you will have plenty of questions about E-commerce, right? Questions such as what is E-commerce, how E-commerce works, what is the history and evolution of E-commerce and etc.

So, I will explain all the doubts. Electronic commerce is a growing aspect of business community that formally in the use of digital transactions between and among businesses and individuals. According to Turban,E-Commerce is the proces of buying, selling or exchanging products, services and information via computer networks. In other words, E-Commerce is the use of the Internet and the web to transact business.

History of ecommerce dates back to the invention of the very old notion of “sell and buy”, electricity, cables, computers, modems, and the Internet. E-commerce became possible in 1991 when the Internet was opened to commercial use. Since that date thousands of businesses have taken up residence at web sites.

E-commerce applications were first developed in the early 1970s and allowed business companies and organizations to send commercial documentation electronically with innovations such as electronic funds transfer(EFT),electronic data interchange(EDI).

When the Internet became commercialized and users began flocking to participate in the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the term electronic commerce was coined.

Then E-commerce applications rapidly expanded. This is because of the development of new networks, protocols, and E-Commerce software. Besides,the increment in competition and other business pressures are also one of the factors.

Since 1995, Internet users have witnessed the development of many innovative applications, ranging from online direct sales to e-learning experiences. In 1999, the emphasis of E-commerce shifted from B2C to B2B, and in 2001 from B2B to B2E, c-commerce, e-government, e-learning, and m-commerce. Given the nature of technology and the Internet,

E-commerce will undoubtedly continue to shift and change. More and more E-commerce success are emerging.By the end of 2001, the largest form of E-commerce, B2B, had around $700 billion in transactions.

According to all available data, E-commerce sales continued to grow in the next few years and, by the end of 2007, E-commerce sales accounted for 3.4 percent of total sales.Overall, the growth of the field will continue to be strong into the foreseeable future. Despite the failures of individual companies and initiatives, the total volume of E-commerce is growing by 15 to 25 percent every year.

Undoubtedly, ecommerce is going to shift and change according to the customer advantage. And it has been estimated to have a dramatically growth as the time goes onwards.

History of E-commerce is a history of a new, virtual world which is evolving according to the customer advantage. It is a world which we are all building together brick by brick, laying a secure foundation for the future generations.

At last, hope all of you gain some knowledge about the history and evolution of E-Commerce by reading and watching the video below.I'll keep you up-to-date.Thanks for viewing!

Revenue model of Google, Amazon and eBay

Hello everyone. Chee Hin here again. After i've created this blog, many people has started asking me the question such as:-

-Why the company created the site?
-How can they earn money from Internet?
-How the information sites can survive without charging any fees?

As we know, most of the businesses' main purpose will be earn money and continue survive and growth in the market. Same as e-commerce company, they also doing business on the Internet to earn money.

Firstly, we need to know what is the revenue model of e-commerce businesses. Revenue model is defined as how an organization earns revenue, produces profits and produces a superior return on invested capital. There are five major types of e-commerce revenue models.

1) Sales revenue model: A company gets the revenue by selling goods, information or services.
2) Transaction fee revenue model: A company receives a commission for enabling or executing a transaction. It is based on the volume of transactions made.
3) Advertising revenue model: A company provides a forum for advertisements and receives fees from the companies that advertise their products.
4) Subscription revenue model: A company charges a subscription fee for the users that access to the content and services offered.
5) Affiliate revenue model: A company receives commissions for referring customers to others web sites.

* I'm just simply explain the 5 revenue models here, readers that wish to know more can refer to any e-commerce books.

Now, i will like to take 3 largest company in different sector as example for me to explain how the e-commerce businesses get profits. They are Google, Amazon and eBay.

Google (http://www.google.com.my/) is the biggest free information sites in the world. As the questions asked by my friends, how Google earn money without charges any fees from users? Actually Google didn't earn money from the users but from the advertising and others.

The main source of Google’s revenue is from advertising, more than 90%. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112million in licensing and other revenues. For the year 2008, only the company's first half total advertising revenues already reach US$11.5billion.

Most of the google's revenue is generated by Google AdWords. It is a pay per click advertising program that is designed to allow the advertisers to present advertisements to people at the instant the people are looking for information related to what the advertiser has to offer.

Pay per click advertising (PPC) means the advertiser need to pay everytime the advertisement received a click. The Advertisers decide the keywords relevant to their offer that should display their advertisement and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click for that keyword and these keywords may be a link to their own websites. This function is a very useful function and will continue to bring about an increase in income especially if the number of people clicking on these advertisements increase.

The other feature provided by google to let advertisers do their advertising are AdSense and Froogle. AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money.Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisement on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-imoression basis. You can access to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense to know more about AdSense. Froogle is a price engine website launched by Google Inc. It is a service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/) is the well known largest online book store in the world. Amazon generates revenue primarily by selling books, videos, electronics, and kitchen equipment on domestic and international Web sites, such as Amazon Marketplace. It is using sales revenue model to earn its income.

Amazon Marketplace is something like eBay. It is a fixed-price online marketplace that allows sellers to offer their goods alongside Amazon's offerings. Buyers can buy new and used items sold directly by a third party through Amazon.com using Amazon Marketplace. Moreover, the users are allows to comment on reviews.

For more information about Amazon, please access to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com.

Ebay (http://www.ebay.com/) is the largest online market place in the world. It allowed individual businesses and consumers can buy and sell products or services worldwide.

EBay generates revenue from a number of fees such as insertion fees (a nonrefundable fee that charged when seller listed the product on eBay), promotional fees (fees that charged for additional listing options that help attract attention for an item, such as highlighted or bold listings), and final value fees (commission that charged to the seller at the end of the auction).

With eBay, consumers now can just shopping at home without going here and there. The product provided in eBay will also usually sell at lower price compare to the market. This is the reason why so many people like to access to eBay to buy and sell their products including 2nd hand products.

In conclusion, different e-commerce businesses will have different way to earn their revenue with different revenue model - Google using advertising model, Amazon using sales model combine with transaction fees and eBay using transaction fees.

I will always encourage people learn more about e-commerce and at least they can create some web site on the internet and earn some extra money for themselves, especially students.

Work harder, you will be the next successful example in e-commerce. Thanks for reading my blog.