e-WorLDBiZ

E-commerce is widely used by individual and organizations these days because it brings many benefits to us such as reduce cycle time, improve employees' empowerment and facilitate customer support.

Reduce Cycle Time
Cycle time is the total amount of time between the orders that placing by consumers and receiving the goods and services. E-commerce can reduce the cycle time by eliminating steps in the business process and take a shorter time to complete a business transaction. Once the customers request the products and make the payment online through credit cards, the organization can send the products directly to the customers without the process of middle man and intermediaries. By this, the organization can reduce the cycle time, costs and gain competitive advantages towards other competitors. For example, TradeNet in Singapore reduced the administrative time of port-related transactions from days to minutes.

Improve Employees' Empowerment
Employees' empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an employee to think, behave, take action and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. By giving more flexibilities to access information such as Internet, Intranet, Electronic-Data-Interchange (EDI) and other access to global regulations and latest information are able to improve employees' empowerment. Therefore, the employees have the ability to make decision for customers, have sufficient alertness of the complaints and they are able to handle the complaints efficiently. By having E-commerce, the employees even can work at their own house and can provide a quick response or feedback to the customers. As a result, it will benefit organization in term of getting closer to customers, improving service quality, innovating continuously, increasing productivity and gaining the competitive edge.

Facilitate Customer Support
E-commerce also providing a wide range of technological solutions and communication opportunity. It can provide unlimited shopping hours for customers to place their order as it is run on a 24 hours basis. Customer has direct access to product information updates, and other promotion by visiting the online stores that create an interactive and easier way for customer to buy the products that they need compared to the traditional stores. Besides, it also provides electronic bulletin for customer in order to report fault and dissatisfaction.

References:
http://www.businesstown.com/internet/ecomm-definition.asp
http://www.remarkable.co.nz/ebusiness/ebusiness_cost_benefit.htm
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080324/0378211.html