At 9:05 PM -0400 11/18/98, Steven J. Owens wrote:
>Hey folks,
>
> Yesterday somebody on another list I'm on asked for the basic
>skinny on "e-commerce". Three or four other people chimed in with "me
>too"s. This got me thinking. We see the word all over the place and
>it's apparently the Buzzword Of The Moment. I've been particularly
>seeing a lot of e-commerce "products" and "applications" lately; are
>these simply shopping cart systems? Credit card processing systems?
>
> What should the "best" e-commerce system contain? What should
>it cost?
I think e-commerce has so many potential meanings and implications that you
have to define it on a case by case basis. Simply put, it's probably safe
to say that e-commerce is any internet-driven operation involving the
transfer of funds in exchange for goods and/or services.
But as your question points out, there's a lot of middle ground. E-commerce
can include shopping carts, credit card verification/authorization,
back-end database integration, integration with inventory and fulfillment
systems, interaction with online banking and/or "cybercash" types of
accounts, data encryption (SSL, etc.) and probably many more things that I
haven't thought of.
I think e-commerce for the small business typically means setting up an
SSL-encrypted shopping cart system to take, but not authorize, credit card
orders via the web. The cost is probably under $10,000, but depends on the
complexity of design, number of products, shopping cart features, server
configuration and much more. This assumes that a hosting system is already
in place.
For larger businesses, you might throw in online credit card
authorization/verification, and integration with some company order
fulfillment system. Now the costs are probably in the $20-$40k range, but
could conceiveably go much higher.
For the amazon.coms of the Web, you're talking six figures and LOTS of
dedicated support staff, redundant servers, all kinds of stuff.
These are just my opinions though. I'd be interested in hearing what others
think on this subject.
-- Gary
---------------------------------------
Gary T. Almes, Words In Progress
voice: 410-515-9714 fax: 410-515-0091
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web: http://www.wordsinprogress.com
ICQ: 13464614 AIM: GaryT32
____________________________________________________________________
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now
Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants
If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done
directly from our website for all our lists.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
