Gary Almes writes:
> 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.
True. I was looking more to the specific usage that seems to be
so prevalent in the media and marketing literature of the last six
months.
> 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.
Certainly SSL is a necessary component of E-commerce, but it's
distinct from e-commerce itself; most decent hosts provide SSL servers
anyway. Though if somebody were to produce a vertical e-commerce
server they'd have to include SSL.
What are "fulfillment systems"? Unless you're operating a
company where you provide marketing, etc and simply resell(*), then
the fulfillment system needs to be a vertical application similar to a
point-of-sale system or an inventory-management system. How do you
integrate this in any company smaller than a major corporation (which
might be expected to maintain their own connectivity, server hardware,
software, and back-end databases)?
Most smaller vertical systems are heavily proprietary, usually
running on some arcane OS or maybe even DOS. The few UNIX-based
vertical systems I've come across (I don't consider myself widely
experienced in this area) were in odd, cryptic, specialized versions
of BASIC or FORTRAN, with bit-field coded databases.
An example would be where you're hosting a site full of book
reviews with the option to purchase, and outsource the fulfillment to
amazon.com. Or another example, you operate a travel agency site with
cross-selling to various related services, with each service
maintained by a separate company with their own web-based ordering
system; your system provides options to order the related service,
then goes out to the related site and posts for the user.
> For the amazon.coms of the Web, you're talking six figures and LOTS of
> dedicated support staff, redundant servers, all kinds of stuff.
No kidding; one of my friends interviewed at Amazon before taking
a job at Star Media (a very highly capitalized web portal that's
specializing in being "The Brazillian AOL", so to speak). Amazon had
(last year) about 200 full-time Perl programmers maintaining their
systems. Of course that begs the question of how *good* those
programmers are...
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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