E-Commerce In Different Sectors

It has improved services, reduce costs, open new channels and transform the competitive landscape. The following are the some of the applications of e-commerce in different sectors.

Ordering journals electronically

Universities and many other organizations order periodicals for their libraries constantly. New periodicals appear every day, people change their preferences, and the librarians are busy. A university will contact an agent to place the orders. The agent, who is in contact with hundreds of publishers, consolidates orders from several universities and then places orders with the publishers. This process is both slow and expensive for the library, which pays commission and loses discount and that the publisher passes on to the agent. It enables a university to submit electronically its encrypted orders and a secure payment authorization to a central computer by EDI. The programs verifies the order and the authorization, transfers the order by EDI to the publishers, and the payment authorization to the automated clearing house for EFT from the buyers bank to the sellers bank.

Broker-base services In a broker-based service, brokers work as intermediaries between buyers and sellers. The buyers can be individuals or organizations. Some of the most notable services are travel agencies, job placement agencies, real estate agencies, insurance agencies, and stock market brokerages. Agents basically make the markets. Some of the markets, such as stocks and travel, may be non-negotiated prices, but a variety of prices exist. Brokers provide many services. For example, travel agents are information brokers that pass information from product suppliers to customers. They also take and process orders, collect money, provide travel assistance, and assist with insurance, possibly providing health and safety suggestions.

Travel and tourism services The travel industry is expanding rapidly around the globe. The Internet is an ideal place to plan, explore, and arrange almost any trip. The home page of a virtual travel agency, such as Expedia, tells you about some of the services available. Some of the services are customized per the consumer's request.

Virtual travel agencies will offer you almost all the services you will find in a conventional travel agency, ranging from information to reservation and purchasing of tickets for your trips, accommodations, and entertainment. In addition to regular services, you will find services most conventional travel agencies do not offer, such as tips provided by people who have experienced certain situations, electronic travel magazines, fare comparisons, currency conversion, fare tracking, worldwide business and the places locator, shopping for travel accessories and books, experts opinions, major international and travel news, driving directions in the United States and several other countries, chat rooms and bulletin boards, and frequent flier deals and personal mileage.

On-line publishing On-line publishing is the electronic delivery of newspapers, magazines, new, and other information through the Internet. It is often related to advertisement since it is provided free in most cases, to attract people to certain sites where advertisement is conducted. Today, on-line publishing is mainly used for disseminating information and for conducting sales transactions interactively Magazine and newspaper publishers such as Ad Week, PC Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angels Times are examples of the users of on-line publishing for dissemination of information. In the future, on-line publishing include more customized material that the reader will receive free, or will pay for.

On-line publishing includes newspapers, magazines, news, textbooks, music, artwork, video clips, and movies. Several publishing methods are in use. They include on-line archive approach, new medium approach, publishing intermediation, and dynamic or just-in-time approach. On-line archive is a digital archive such as library catalogues bibliographic databases. The new medium approach is used by those publishers that view the Web as a medium for creating new material. This form of publishing adds extra comprehensiveness to any issue or topic that traditional magazine publishing cannot offer. The publishing intermediation approach can be thought of as an on-line directory for news services. The dynamic or just-in-time approach is another method of on-line publishing. With these, approach content can be created in real-time and transmitted on the fly in the format best suited to the user's location, tastes, and preferences.

Edutainment On-line publishing has grow into other areas of usage with concepts such as edutainment and push technology. Edutainment is a combination of education, entertainment, and games. One of the main goals of edutainment is to make the students become an active learner instead of a passive one. With active learning a student is more involved in the experience of learning and, therefore, it makes the learning experience richer and the knowledge gained more memorable.

There are managerial issues to consider with edutainment in on-line publishing. Educational games are delivered mostly as CD-ROMs. However, since 1998 there are an increasing number of companies that offer edutainment on-line in a distance learning format.

Knowledge dissemination On-line publishing is very closely related to the concept of Knowledge Dissemination, which can be done in several ways. In this section we briefly look at two applications: virtual teaching and on-line consulting.

Virtual teaching The concept of distance learning, or learning at home, is not new. Educational institutions have been offering correspondence degrees for decades. Lately, IT in general and the Web in particular expanded the opportunities for distance learning. Many universities offer limited courses and degrees, but use innovative teaching methods and multimedia support.

The virtual university concept allows universities to offer classes worldwide. Moreover, we may soon have integrated degrees, where students, customizing a degree that will best fit their needs, will be able to take courses at different universities.

On-line consulting This is a rapidly growing field in which tens of thousands of experts of all kinds sell their expertise, for a relatively low price, on the Internet. Here are some examples:

-Medical advice to provide consultation with top experts

-Management consulting to provide accumulated expertise from knowl­edge bases

-Legal advice to deliver legal consultation services to business

-Financial advice to offer extensive financial advice.