E commerce stands for Electronic commerce. The buying and selling of products and services by businesses and customers over an electronic medium (Internet), without using paper documents. Electronic commerce refers to the commercial activities like on-line shopping and payment transactions using computers and the Internet.
Electronic commerce involves the technologies like mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, internet marketing, online transaction processing, supply chain management, and automated data collection systems etc.There are many e-commerce sites to selling various kinds of products ,using this websites people can buy all varieties of things by sitting at their homes. Payments usually are made via net banking, debit cards or credit cards. Many e-commerce sites also offer facilities of ‘cash on delivery’ these days and E -commerce covers the global information economy.
Mechanism:
Customer browsed your e-commerce websites and he tries to order. Web browser will communicate back-and-forth through the Internet with a Web server which will manage the store’s website. The Web server will send order to the order manager and each stage of processing from submission to dispatch this will get orders. Order manager inquiries a database that what customer wants is actually in stock or not. If the item that customer wants is not in stock, the stock database system will order new item from the manufacturers and it confirms whether the item is in stock or suggests an estimated delivery date when supplies will be received from the manufacturer. The order manager will continue the process when item is in stock and take a payment using the customer’s credit or debit card number, it will communicate with a merchant system which will run by a credit-card processing firm or linked to a bank. The merchant system might make extra checks with the customer’s own bank computer. The bank computer confirms whether the customer has enough funds. The merchant system authorizes the transaction to go ahead, though funds will not be completely transferred until several days later. The order manager confirms that the transaction has been successfully processed and notifies the Web server. The Web server will inform the customer about confirming her order is processed and the transaction is completed. The order manager will send a request to the warehouse to dispatch the goods to the customer. Goods from the warehouse will collected by a truck from a dispatch firm and delivers them. Once the goods have been dispatched, the warehouse computer e-mails the customer to confirm that her goods are on their way and then goods are delivered to the customer. Different sites have a slightly different way of dealing with the process but overall this is the process followed e-commerce websites.
There is some process that accepts their order and to process we have software called shopping cart.
The shopping cart performs several other tasks. The shopping cart is what your customers will use to place orders. Customers add the products they want to purchase to the cart, provide information about shipping and payment, and then submit the order. It computes the taxes and processes the coupons and other discounts. It will capture the billing and delivery address of the customer. It confirming user acceptance of terms of service and other conditions of sale and create a code like invoice number, order number, tracking number. The shopping cart Presenting customers with delivery options and adding the corresponding fee and promoting customers to the payment gateway.
Accepting payments is the backbone of any online store. Without it, customers can’t place orders. E-commerce transaction involves transacting money. Some e-commerce website might provide credit for purchases. This process is conducted by software called the Payment gateway.
The Payment gateway performs:
1.Take customers to payment options.
2.Receives identification details like credit card numbers.
3.it will give authentication to customers using a password, code.