E-Commerce and its impact on the Global Marketplace Essay

E-Commerce and its impact on the Global Marketplace - Essay Example The main impact of E-Commerce is the fact that the global marketplace never sleeps and working 24/7, 365 days a year. It functions across different time zones as well as geographic boundaries. The integration of synergies leads to an extraordinary improvement in efficiencies. The presence of better and improved software enables the companies to conduct business online in an automated fashion leading to better productivity. It opens up a better competitive arena even to smaller companies with lesser resources at their disposal. It symbolizes the usage of the complete potential of the Internet and using it to gain profitability. Inter-business transactions or business-to-business (B2B) or e-commerce between businesses usually between manufacturers and suppliers. The other is the transaction between businesses and consumers (B2C) or electronic retailing. B2B type of E-Commerce is more common because of the usage of computer technology to a large extent by businesses, B2C in the form of online retailing has picked up exponentially. The success story of Wal-Mart has been extensively discussed and analysed. Sam Walton's guiding principles of "everyday low prices " have made Wal-Mart the world's largest retailer. The availability of the product when the customer looks for it on the shelf has to be accomplished, at the lowest possible cost without high overheads Using E-Commerce Supply Chain to Support Low Prices and Increased Customer Satisfaction "At Wal-Mart, we don't implement technology for its own sake," says David Flanagin, Director of Network Engineering. "It has to have a payback that helps the customer."(Quoted from http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/ibs/vertical/retail/Wal-Mart.PDF) So when the Wal-Mart network that unifies more than 100,0000 employees in more than 2400 stores and 100 distribution centres was undertaken, the Cisco network was chosen after great deliberation. Unifying and coordinating retailers and suppliers were of paramount importance. The number is staggering considering there are thousands of products and hundreds of suppliers and these are shipped to myriad destinations in the actual seasonal periods when they are sold. Wal-Mart ventured into EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) in 1980 and used it to transmit data to its suppliers. By 1990 Wal-Mart had its own application called "Retail Linka" and suppliers used modems to dial into the network for sales and inventory data. This enabled better forecasting and planning, producing and shipping. With the growing E-Commerce scenario, Wal-Mart utilized the power of the Internet and using the Cisco network, Wal-Mart updated and reorganized the "Retail Linka" to a greater level of competence and usability. Logins are password protected and each supplier has a level to which he is able to access the information. "We