Discuss how E-commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees' empowerment and facilitate customer support

Reduce cycle time
Cycle time is a period of time between a customer placing an order and receiving the goods. It can help the company to reduce the cycle time by creating an effective and direct system without wasting any available time. Through e-commerce, the cycle time can be reduced by eliminating the time taken to process in between supplier, intermediaries and customer. The customer can immediately make an order of the material needed no matter in what time zone to access to the internet. For example, Dell and FedEx allow people carry out the businesses without the barriers of time or distance. People can make the transaction within day or night, 24-hours a day or purchase or sell anything one desire at a single click of the mouse. Beside that, cycle time also can be reduced through improvement along the supply chain such as by using Radio Frequency identification (RFID).

Empowerment
E-commerce can improve the employees’ empowerment by grants power to employees in dealing with process of capturing, searching and leveraging business information and also improves employees’ empowerment where provides enabling technologies for the company’s employees. This can help in more flexibility for the employees in conducting their works and improve employee knowledge and effectiveness which can help to reduces contact handle times. This is providing a quick response or feedback to the customers through the internet without any process that need take a long time to be proved. Beside that, the productivity will be improved if the employees are empowered. Nowadays, employees are not strictly under supervision and the workload of manager could be reduced because they do not need to approve all the small decision unless it was important.

Facilitate customer support
Building and maintaining customer relationships is the key to success in e-commerce and, unless service is maintained, customer loss may result, more than offsetting any cost efficiencies due to introducing e-commerce technology. Since the core of e-commerce is information and communications, support for managing customer relationships is available to those who know how to use it.

By allowing customers to track delivery of parcels in real time, the Federal Express website keeps customers in touch with the location of their goods and when they will arrive. Provision of this sort of information creates greater customer satisfaction and sense of control.

Automatic Teller Machines (ATM’s) are now well used by most bank customers, who, although some still express feelings about the lack of personal interaction with bank staff, generally would not want to return to the old system of standing in a queue for personal service. They feel more in control of the transaction process and can access their information any time.


Publishing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) on a website saves customers time and money waiting on the phone for responses. They also allow the business to concentrate on generating more business rather than dealing with often simple issues.

An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

There are some successful e-commerce companies such as eBay, Google, and Yahoo. However, there have large numbers of e-commerce companies that are not able to maintain their profit through e-commerce. Boo.com is one of the companies which failure in doing the e-commerce business, Boo.com was a United Kingdom company founded by Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, which later flopped after having to liquidate and was placed into receivership in 18 May 2000. Boo.com’s intention is to sell branded fashion apparel over the Internet. There have some reason of the failures; one of the problems was mismanagement, technology and limited space available to display product information to customer.

1) Trying to sell the wrong product online

There have some products that are not appropriate to be sold through online. For the products which are inexpensive and could be easily bought from the local store are not worth selling through using on the internet. Beside the inexpensive products, products such as clothes and shoes which need trying would be difficult to sell because it need people try the products from the local store too.

2) Poor customer service

Online service provides less interaction between the customer and seller. Customer just can find the information which have provide by the website they surf. The information may be limited to enable provide knowledge about the product to the customer, so it can confuse the customer about the product and this poor customer service would send the customers running away. So it need to provide excellent service to satisfy customer needs and wants.

3) A poorly designed website

Poor designed website has a major effect to bring the failure of the e-commerce. Overcrowding can bring the poor customer service, because it can make the customer confuse with the graphics was present. Professional website need to feature the items clearly with the photos and descriptions. Beside that, too much color, flash animation or graphics could slow down the downloading process which brings the poor customer service.

4) Lack of marketing

Marketing of the site is needed for both online and offline. Marketing is the process of interesting potential customers in products and services provided. So marketing is essential to let you know your competitive advantage and to show your customers with the best price that can be offer compare with the others competitors. Beside that, the company should do some surveys and collect information in order to fulfill the customer needs and wants.

An example of an E-commerce success and its causes

There are many success examples of e-commerce website that have been created such as http://www.ebay.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, http://www.lelong.com/ , http://www.dell.com/ and so on.

The example of success of E-Commence business i want to highlight here is E-Bay. Ebay is a business that used of E-Commerce to commence its business. It had successful it business by enrolled it in this field with good strategic planning. Hence, it leads to this business to a long term growth.

1. Effectiveness

The key success of Ebay is cause by the Effective which is concerned with “doing the right thing” between Persistent Marketing and Public relationship of the owner. By implement the strategic marketing policies in promoting their products and the cheap price quoted, it attracted a lot of customer to view and purchase their product all the times and indirectly continuous increase their profit.

2. Great customers’ service

Another cause of their success is Ebay give great customers’ services. Ebay maintain continuous concern on their customer and understand customers’ needs. Maintenance and warranty provided for the customer that purchases their goods and found out damages.


3. Useful tools

Ebay provided easy and convenience tools for the users to select their items purchases, simply clicking on the product, the design of the webpage will bring customer to other sites of the products. Users’ friendly webpage allows customers to view on details and explanation on the products before making purchases.

4. Payment process

Not only that’s, another key success of Ebay is based on the safety banking payment process. Ebay business provide safe environment for the users and customer that browsing their webpage and when they making purchase through the internet, this sites making it private and disallow hacking on customer password by other intentional hackers.


In conclusion, E-Commerce services provided by Ebay keeping on success because their reputation and marketing policies in dealing with customer.

The history and evolution of E-commerce

What is mean by E-commerce?

E-commerce is any business related transactions partially or totally carried out by electronic medium especially on internet using Open networks or Closed network.

Evolution of E-commmerce

Year	Event
1960	Electronic Data Interchange ( EDI ) was formulated. EDI is a set of standard instructions to exchange business information and do electronic transaction.
1969	Americas department of defence was developed ARPANET. ARPANET used for researching new reliable network.
1991	Word Wide Web which is developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN started the first Internet transaction. Word Wide Web only supported exchange of data that was in text format.
1992	Mosaic web-browser arrived. Mosaic web-browser was the first ‘point and click’ browser which is developed by Marc Andreessen. It used to interchange text and graphic.
1994	Marc Andreessen successful developed 2nd graphic browser which call Netscape. Microsoft Internet Exployer was come up at the same time.
1998	Digital Subscriber Line (DSL ) provided more faster access. It persistent connection to the internet. The online transaction was increased rapidly at that time.
1996-2000	E-commerce was spread to a significant group by globally within these four years. E-commerce became an important part for the consumers.
2008	US E-commerce and Online Retail retained a success which the sales projected to reach $ 204 billion.