Why Online Search Marketing?

According to eCommera, report, Online retail continues to grow, with 42.6% of UK consumers buy online at least once a week, and the average online spend per shopper reached £71 per month. This amplifies the importance of online presence for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Having just a website with out appropriate promotion will not give any advantages what so ever no matter how effective and user friendly your website is. Search engine marketing is the most effective way of promoting website in the cyber space.

In the age of information explosion the volume of information on the Internet is growing and the web has become a huge warehouse of vast information resources. However, effective access to the most relevant resources available on the Internet is one of the chief concerns for users and becoming a critical problem. In this situation Internet search engines and search engine based portals become navigator to their users.

Search engine marketing can be vital to a business because 90% of all online traffic is achieved through the various search engines. Search engines are emerging as a new form of intermediaries in the cyber world. So, any organisation who can exploit the opportunities provided by internet search engines can achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an umbrella term that covers two broad areas:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It is the process of getting traffic from the organic or natural listings on search engines. SEO is free way to achieve traffic to your website however SEO encompasses a wide variety of tasks which obviously cost money and time and need to wait longer period of time to see tangible value.
Paid Search Marketing -Pay Per Click (PPC)

Paid search marketing commonly known as Pay per Click (PPC) is the quickest way to see tangible results in online marketing. Pay-Per-click (PPC) advertising provides excellent opportunity for Business to target, relevant online ads to audiences when they are actively searching for; within a controlled budget, and results are easy to measure. And of course audiences can be targeted in every stages of the buying cycle. This dynamic area of online marketing already worth around £ 3 billion in UK per year and possesses huge potentiality of growth.

Each of the main search engines has it’s own advertising programmes

• Google : Google Adwords
• Yahoo: Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Bing: Microsoft adCenter

Google as Google is continuously dominating the search market. Latest search engines market share report shows that in UK more than 91.07% searches are done through Google, 2.7% through Yahoo and 3.1% through Bing. Hence, there is valid reason to concentrate your optimisation in Google Adwords later Google’s optimised campaigns can be replicated to other search engines easily.

8 Ways to Improve Paid Search Campaign

Why Paid Search (PPC) Marketing?

Paid search marketing commonly known as Pay per Click (PPC) is the quickest way to see tangible results in online marketing. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising provides excellent opportunity for Business to target, relevant online ads to audiences when they are actively searching for; within a controlled budget, and results are easy to measure. And of course audiences can be targeted in every stages of the buying cycle. This dynamic area of online marketing already worth around £ 3 billion in UK per year and possesses huge potentiality of growth and Google is continuously dominating the search market.

Why Google?

Latest search engines market share report shows that in UK more than 90% searches are done through Google, 5% through Yahoo and 3% through Bing. Hence, there is valid reason to concentrate your optimisation in Google Adwords later Google’s optimised campaigns can be replicated to other search engines easily.


How to Optimised PPC campaign in Google?

1. Find out your target Audience
Unless you sale everything for everyone, you need to focus on your potential audiences. Better understanding of your audiences will enable you to target appropriate message to grab their attention.

2. Identify what you want to achieve from your PPC Campaign
Your need to clearly set out your PPC marketing objective such: brand enforcement by increasing traffic or increasing lead or sales and ROI. With that in mind, start conducting your keyword research and identify those phrases that will help drive the right traffic to your site.

3. Understanding Google Quality Score
Quality Score is a dynamic value assigned by Google on each key word in an Adwords campaign. Google use this mechanism to identify the relevancy and quality of Ads and landing page to key wards. There are various factors which Google takes into consideration to identify the quality score of a particular key phrase such as:
• Click through Rate (CTR) of key phrase
• Historical Adwords account performance
• Historical CTR of display URL
• Relevancy between key words and ad creative
• Quality of landing page
• Landing page load time and others relevant factors

Higher quality score of a keyword will result higher ad position within Google search and content network. Higher quality score also lower the cost per click (CPC).

Start with experimental budget at first covering a number of words and then try and narrow that down. You need to continually analyse the keywords to make sure you’re getting the greatest return. You also need to tailor the wording of your ad to make it relevant to the search word.

4. Campaign structure
It is always good to replicate the structure of the website in to Adwords account such as every single product is grouped into an ad group and every single category grouped into a campaign. Which helps to develop theme based keywords for every single ad group this will increase relevancy among key word ad creative and landing page which will increase CTR, one of the important factors for higher quality score.

5. Ad Creative
You will have only 95 characters long message to convince your audience that you have what they are looking for. So highly targeted and compelling message need to embed in an ad creative to get customers attention. Using the keywords that a customer uses to search for a particular product or service, will naturally grab the customer attention and provoke them to click on the site.

Try to include one benefit and one call to action in the pay per click ad body text and always try at least two version of ad creative and see which one performs better. PPC is all about continually testing, tracking, and refining. If you test - track carefully and test long enough to make data driven decision.


6. Key Words Research/Refine
Using tools such as Google key word tool to get key word ideas, using various reports such as search query performance report and search term report to find out what are the key terms are being used to find your website, if keywords are not related to you website include them into negative keywords list and also taking advantage of match type to control unwanted traffics.

7. Landing page quality
Landing page need to be very targeted and provoking audience to take action by using call to action phrases. Make sure each landing page contains content that will deliver on your ad's message or promise. Use Google web optimiser tool to test different version of landing pages to achieve higher conversion rate.

8. Performance measuring /Testing
PPC is all about continually testing, tracking, and refining this will help to identify successful keywords and successful PPC advertisements. It is always good to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPI) which is very important for your search marketing campaign such Impression, Cost per Click (CPC), Click through Rate (CTR), Quality Score, Conversion, Return on Investment (ROI). The key indicator to look at is your CTR, a primary factor of achieving a high Quality Score and importantly you need to focus on Quality Score which will have impact on ad ranking and cost of search marketing.

Why Search Engine Marketing?

As search engine marketing is an incredibly effective channel for connecting with potential customers and becoming the powerhouse of the online marketing landscape, dominated by Google. Furthermore, it has been widely recognized the importance of internet technology for the success of any organisation. See more about Search Engine Marketing

My Research Proposal for PhD

Background

In the age of information explosion the volume of information on the Internet is growing and the web has become a huge warehouse of vast information resources. However, effective access to the most relevant resources available on the Internet is one of the chief concerns for users and becoming a critical problem. In this situation Internet search engines and search engine based portals become navigator to their users. Bharat and Broder (1998) believe that “search engines are among the most useful and popular services on the web”. However, some ( eg: Moghaddam and Parirokh :2006, Dogpile:2005) argue that current available search engines have been overwhelmed by thousands of documents resulting in information overload or chaos and a single search engine, which has powerful capabilities cannot search and retrieve comprehensively all of the resources available on the Internet. Moghaddam et al. (2006) believe that the major search engine (such as Google, Yahoo Altavista, Excite, etc) index only a fraction of the publicly indexable web.

The web is growing at a much faster speed than the indexing capabilities of those search engines; in addition programs such as robots and spiders, which are used by majority of the search engines cannot indexed many web pages; although they can be searched through local search engines (Meng, Yu and Wu: 2001). So, no single search engine can index the entire web. Moreover, every search engine indexes different web pages, which means if only one search engine is used, relevant results from other search engines will be missed (Bazac, 2002 cited in Moghaddam and Parirokh: 2006).
Spink et al.(2006) suggested that web search engines can differ from one another in three ways – crawling reach, frequency of the updates, and relevancy analysis. So performance capabilities and limitation of each search engine is different. Various studies (eg: Ding and Marchionini: 1996, Bharat and Broder: 1998, Spink et al.:2006 ) showed that very low overlap between results retrieved by different Web search engines for the same queries. Furthermore, Lawrence and Giles (1998) study showed that any single web search engines indexes no more than 16 percent of all web sites.


Meta-search engines

Continuous increase in the size of web, the relative coverage of individual search engines is decreasing and search tools that combine the results of multiple search engines are becoming more valuable (Lawrence and Giles: 1999). Consequently, search tools called meta-search engines have been designed so users can search the web more effectively. Meta-search engines send the query to several search engines at once and return the results from all of the search engines in one long unified list by exploiting simultaneously the best features of many individual search engines (Langville and Meyer: 2006). Unlike individual search engines and subject directory-based information systems, meta-search engines do not crawl the Internet and therefore they do not maintain their own databases. So, meta-search engines’ performance based on the performance of the combination of individual search engines included. This unique feature of meta-search engines enable users to search more of the web in less time and do it with only one click. Furthermore, Zhang and Cheung (2003) argue that meta-search engines’ customised and advanced search features offer an excellent alternative for users to improve both search effectiveness and efficiency, which will make them more appealing for information professionals and personal users. Moreover, other various studies (eg: Hu et al. 2001, Hai et al.: 2004) show the attractiveness of the meta-search engines.

Interestingly, none of the meta-search engines rank top based on the Nielsen//NetRatings search reporting service: 2006 report. According to this report Google: 49.2%, Yahoo: 23.8%, MSN: 9.6, AOL: 6.3%, ASK: 2.6% and others: 8.5% posses search market share. So, my study intend to focus on underlying issues of meta-search engines and identify causes which are stopping meta-search engines even though meta-search engines have greater advantage over individual search engines; to serve greater percentage of users.

Research questions

In particular, I would like to explore the two following questions:
1. Which search engines deal best with which types of queries?
2. Can a meta-search engine be designed that directs queries to thesearch engines best able to handle them?

I believe the findings of my study will benefit both meta-search engine developers and users.

E-Commerce: to enhance SMEs’ performance

E-commerce is a process of doing just about every aspect of business over the internet, which uses diverse technologies and embraces a wide range of financial forms such as electronic banking, electronic trading, electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic mail (E-mail) and all forms of messaging between Enterprises. E-commerce is a modern business methodology that addresses the needs of organisations, merchants, and consumers to cut costs while improving the quality of goods and services. This is also an unavoidable reality as the prime promoter of commerce and trade around the world.
E-commerce offers unprecedented opportunities to both consumer and supplier. From the supplier prospective Companies are not limited to physical locations or their own organizational boundaries for providing products and services. E-commerce allows trade to become simpler and more streamlined, thus increasing the value and speed of transactions. Any company can enter global markets where size and location have become rather irrelevant. From the consumer prospect the number one advantage of e-commerce is convenience of use. The user can browse online stores; compare prices and order products and services sitting at home on his/her PC. This provides considerable advantages over traditional commerce such as no dealing with traffic on the road or rude salesmen and access to a large market and wide range to explore before buying or selling without getting out of their comfortable chair. Apart from these obvious advantages, e-commerce also provides some other specific features, which gives it an edge over traditional commerce. One such feature is online customer service. According to Forrester Research, 37 percent of online consumers use customer service more from Web retailers than traditional retailers because of its potential for ease of use and quick response times.
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are important in a developing country like Nepal. It has a significant contribution to the nations’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP). According to the Federation of Nepal Cottage and Small Industries (FNCSI), the SMEs contribute 90 per cent to the industrial GDP of Nepal, and this sector engages 87 per cent of the labour force and employment. The Department of Cottage and Small Industries (DoCSI) statistics show that there are a total of around 170,000 cottage and small industries (CSIs) registered in the country, and they provide employment to about 1.6 million people. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have been playing a crucial role in the economic development of Nepal. They have been generating employment, leading to increased participation of indigenous people, use of local resources, generation of technological innovations and provision of skills and training at a low cost to the people. The major exportable items like woollen carpet, pashmina products and handicraft goods produced by SMEs have been major sources of earning foreign currency. SMEs are more suitable for Nepal because they generate employment since they use relatively less imported material and equipment while the large business sector is very dependent on such imports.
The growth, integration, convergence and sophistication of information and communications technologies (ICT) are changing society and economy. The basic structures and trend of marketing also have changed. One can see visible changes in international marketing strategies. Many companies have started to use the Internet to increase their marketing access and have improved their profitability by doing so. A profound change is likely to result, as consumers can now directly order manufacturers. It threatens to displace market intermediaries, such as insurance agents, travel agents, stockbrokers, bookstores, and consumer product retailers. These middlemen will be disintermediated and virtually replaced by infomediaries or modern internet technologies and also help consumers to become more empowered with product information. This process will make consumer more demanding, they know what is possible and unwilling to accept anything less than the best.
Although Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in the country’s economy, and can play vital roles in creating dynamic and market-oriented economic growth, employment for the growing work force especially in the rural areas and for reducing poverty in Nepal. They could not face the challenges of changing European and American markets using information technology of the 21st century. In this context, electronic-commerce can be a good medium for today’s competition and modernisation, to recognise the modern multilateral trading system and to participate in the international trade. For LCD countries like Nepal technology plays important role to boost nation’s overall production capacity and efficiency. E-commerce accelerates the process of economic growth by speeding up the diffusion of new technologies. Potential benefits of e-commerce for Nepalese SMEs are immense. Any company can enter global markets where size and location have become rather irrelevant. Success in e-commerce will have an immediate impact not only on productivity and profits, but also generate new jobs employment and livelihood.
Since, developing a basic e-commerce site doesn’t require heavy investment, using an e-commerce site need not necessarily incurs additional expenses. Having an e-commerce site is possibly one of the best ways to make money from internet. It is just like to set up an additional virtual store in a minimal cost. This can be a second branch office for your business where customers from around the globe can explore products and services and place orders on their convenient time. As e-commerce isn’t dictated by any geographic barrier, SMEs, by using the online business model, can potentially market their products and services in a global market. A recent research shows that the number of online shoppers worldwide is increasing each day, and it’s obvious that online shopping will dominate the retail market in coming days. As we know that because of the internet technologies consumers are being more empowered with product information. This could be an opportunity for Nepalese business firm because Nepalese products will be less expensive than the western ones. But we must pay attention for the quality of the products. To trap this opportunity Nepalese Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) should take further steps towards international marketing and promotion of their products and services through e-commerce.
Apart from isolated effort undertaken by few business firms there is still lot to do in the field of e-commerce in Nepal. Some Nepalese business entrepreneurs use internet but they use it only for research and email purpose. There are very few business firms which are utilizing e-commerce as their marketing tools such as Muncha.com, which is a good example in this category. www.muncha.com is an online extension of Muncha House, one of the oldest departmental stores in Kathmandu. This is the pioneer internet venture to offer Daal, Chaamal on the internet. The handicraft Association of Nepal has started a vertical portal at www.nepalhandicraft.com.np which has links to its member home pages and other information to promote their interest internationally. www.b2b.com.np is the National Business to Business (B2B) e-Commerce Market Place as a single electronic gateway to promote the market linkages within the country and with the international markets. Some other business firms such as netfornepal.com, shopnbds.com, thamel.com, nepala.com and so on are also utilizing e-commerce as their marketing tools. Other business firms who have not yet actively participated in this race should learn from those who already have established their presence in the new economy to trap the opportunities provided by modern technologies
After accession of WTO, We have tremendous opportunities for exporting our products in the international market. But to substantially benefit from international trade, we must need to strengthen our capacity by increasing our competitiveness through enhancement of technological capability to increase efficiencies in the productions, distribution and sale of goods and services. There is an urgent need for Nepali entrepreneurs, involved with SMEs, to market their product to outer world; otherwise they will be left behind. There is lack of awareness among the Nepalese entrepreneur about the benefits of e-commerce and also majority of Nepalese businessmen those who are involved with SMEs don’t have the basic knowledge about how a basic e-commerce website works. They give least important to sales and promotion activities because they are regarded as a higher cost seeking component; it is just a perception, through the internet they can promote their products and services worldwide at nominal cost.
Nepal’s Government and other stake holders should create an image of e-commerce awareness and leadership and demonstrate to the business community the importance of e-commerce. Government should consider e-commerce issues at the highest level. Government should also identify e-commerce as a critical element of international competetitiveness. And also Nepalese entrepreneur should realize that there is urgent need for SMEs to follow e-commerce to cope with the fast changing global business environment.

Note: this article was published on http://literature.wnso.org/2005/E_commerce_Tika.htm

Globalisation ICT and Nepal

Globalisation is the most talked and debated issue in the contemporary world. It is a concept that escapes precise definition. In most cases, it is described rather than defined. However, it does not mean the same thing for all. For some, globalisation is a process of opening up economies so that trade between countries could take place freely. For them increasing globalisation has helped the expansion of opportunities for nations and benefited workers in rich and poor countries alike. Brings positive benefits for consumers, helping to increase choice, drive down prices, improve services and create new jobs and opportunities. Globalisation can therefore be seen as a positive force for change that has the potential to raise living standards and drive economies forward.
However, this is not readily acceptable for all. Many think globalisation as the concerted strategy of the industrial world, particularly of the Multinational Corporations, to safeguard their interest and spur a new form of colonisation. After opening of our market, our country will become a supermarket of foreign goods, which are cheaper, killing our local industries, increasing many more jobless. For them, globalisation means increasing poverty and deteriorating living standard of the workers, widening disparity between the rich and the poor within the country and also among the countries, and internationalisation of capital to the detriment of labour market. Even for the moderates, globalisation is a process of restructuring the world economy to find ways for business to maximise profits.
The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO and more generally, the high income countries are held responsible for influencing and largely determining the course of the globalisation process. They are also seen as the driving forces behind the policy reforms that the developing countries had to implement as part of their structural adjustment programs under the supervision of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. It is obvious that those countries and organisations will only foster their own interests. Globalization has become an unstoppable phenomenon affecting all aspects of our lives. Some Governments, political parties and trade unions often view this development as at best challenging and at worst sinister. Business and their representative organisations, on the other hand, promote the benefits of open trade across political boundaries and the integration of markets to create global opportunities.
Globalization is a process of increasing economic and non-economic linkages across the world. In the broadest sense Globalization implies integration of economies and societies across the globe. It is equated with the massive, irresistible cross-border flow and integration in the movement of goods, technology, labour and capital, resulting mainly from breakthroughs in transportation and communication. In a wider perspective, Globalisation, covers, various activities such as cultural globalisation, political globalisation, ecological globalisation, economic globalization and so on. But Here I am only discussing about economic globalisation. Economic globalisation implies increasing global inter-linkages of the markets in goods, services, capital and financing. Such a process has speeded up in the recent decade. The contributory factors for rapid economic globalisation are liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, and declining costs of transport and communication.
The micro-electronics revolution has irrevocably changed the essence of human contact to earth. Distances are shrinking and information is spreading faster than ever before. The internet and World Wide Web have helped this process. Perhaps the most important catalyst for globalization is the spread of information and communications technology (ICT). Through the magic of ICT, it is now possible to instantly access useful information through the Internet and the latest computer technology.
While talking about globalisation, we must understand that our national economy has not even internally integrated. Market institutions and forces are yet to emerge in a competitive way. Nearly half of the population lives in absolute poverty and illiteracy. More than 80 per cent of the population earns livelihood from agriculture, which, however, constitutes only 40 per cent of the country's national income. Lack of proper planning process, commitment, accountability, and integrity of the government, and in lack of people's participation in development activities. The developing countries, particularly the least developed countries (LDCs) like Nepal, have not been able to substantially benefit from international trade due to both external as well as internal constraints. The developing countries have not been able to increase their share in international trade in spite of the preferential market access opportunities provided by the developed countries. It has been realised that market access for the developing countries is commercially meaningless if they cannot increase their competitiveness in the sectors in which they have preferential treatment. In the developing countries, lack of efficient production facilities, adequate infrastructure, weak management capacities, low level of technology and lack of technological capacity and inefficient transportation and communication, limits their potential to specialise in crucial productive sectors and to reap the benefit of preferential trading facilities.
For an economy like ours to integrate into the world trading system on terms and conditions favourable to our development needs, we need to build our capacity to negotiate at the multilateral level. This will happen only if we are able to increase our ability to understand the multilateral trading regime espoused by the WTO and formulate our national policies to benefit from it.
We also need to strengthen our capacity to benefit from international trade by increasing our competitiveness through investment in infrastructure, development of human resources, strengthening of institutional capacity, enhancement of technological capability, and supporting local enterprises, including linkages between large and small enterprises. By joining the WTO, Nepal can now fully enjoy the rights that all members have under the WTO agreements, such as non-discrimination by other WTO members and the ability to use the WTO's dispute settlement procedure. This membership will provide tremendous international market opportunities to Nepal. However, taking advantage of the new opportunity will also be quite challenging. Nepal has few industries and hence very little to export. Garments and carpets account for most of the country's total exports. Despite being an agricultural economy, it does not have enough surplus produce. Threats to domestic industries from cheap imports also loom.
ICT allows trade to become simpler and more streamlined, thus increasing the value and speed of transactions. Companies are not limited to physical locations or their own organizational boundaries for providing products and services. Networked information systems are allowing companies to coordinate their geographically distributed capabilities and even coordinate with other organization as virtual corporation. One major advantage of promoting electronic commerce in Nepal is that it can provide relatively cheap access to global markets even for small and medium-sized enterprises in remote areas. Small and medium Enterprises (SMEs) have been playing a significant role in the economic development of Nepal. The major exportable items like woolen carpets, Pashmina products and handicraft goods produced by SMEs have been major sources of earning foreign currency. Potential benefits of e-commerce for the developing countries like Nepal are immense. Any company can enter global markets where size and location have become rather irrelevant. Success in e-commerce will have an immediate impact not only on productivity and profits, but also generate new jobs employment and livelihood.
After accession of WTO, We have tremendous opportunities for exporting our products in the international market. But to substantially benefit from international trade, we must need to strengthen our capacity by increasing our competitiveness through investment in infrastructure, development of human resources, strengthening of institutional capacity, enhancement of technological capability, and supporting local enterprises, including linkages between large and small enterprises. We have been experiencing the fact that the more technologically capable countries continue to dominate their less capable counterparts, effectively monopolizing opportunities for economic growth through their insurmountable advantage in ICT. Given these diverse possibilities occasioned by globalization, it is of extreme necessity for Nepal to re-examine the trends in ICT development worldwide and devise ways by which its advantages can be maximized. This includes the need to extend the breadth and reach of ICT to peoples and sectors that stand to benefit the most, while curtailing its illicit and destructive uses.

Note: this article was published at All Free Essays . com

Internet search engine marketing and its importance

As search engine marketing is an incredibly effective channel for connecting with potential customers and becoming the powerhouse of the online marketing landscape, dominated by Google. Furthermore, it has been widely recognized the importance of internet technology for the success of any organisation but I have not came a cross with any study focused on role of search engine marketing and its importance to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

There are evidence exist that investment on online marketing is increasing as the internet users are increasing. Online marketing specially search engine marketing is evolving like anything, it wouldn't be too much to say that in coming years this segment will surpass the print media's share in advertising. accoriding to Chaffey(2005) more than 50% internet users use search engine to find thier search because they don't remember full URL of the site they want to visit, they search those site through search engine such as google, yahoo, MSN ect with the help of key words. So, it is increasingly becoming important for any organisation to survive in virtual world.

WHAT IS LOW-COST CARRIERS?

By Tika R. Kandel

(Part of my dissertation)

Lowcost airline also known as lowcost carrier, budget airline, lowfare airline, nofrills carrier is an airline that offers cheaper services. To be able to offer lower fare; lowcost airline liminates most of the traditional services such as free inflight services and replaced by optional paidfor inflight
services such as food and drink. Having only one passenger class and one type of planes, flying to cheaper or secondary airports, point to point flights with fast turnaround times are some of the strategies used by most of the lowcost airlines. Tickets are often sold through Internet and call centre, which cut down administrative cost.

Lowcost airlines use special pricing strategy where fares increase as the planes fill up. This strategy rewards customers for early reservation, which is known as yield management. Further more the seating density on low cost aircraft is higher than full service carriers. Thus cost saving are mainly made in the areas of distribution, service and aircraft utilisation. (See Dogains: 2006, Piga and Filippi: 2002, Pender & Baum: 2000).

The concept of low cost airlines or no frills carriers was started from USA. Initially implemented by Pacific South West airlines and later replicated by various new entrants however few of them survived; Southwest airlines, most successful lowcost carrier adapted lowcost strategy in 1973. Despite the early success of low cost business model in USA, it took 18 years to adapt in European market. Ryanair became, the pioneer to adopt lowcost strategy after a visit to Southwest Airlines in 1991. Later, in 1995 and 1996 EasyJet and Debonair respectively joined the lowcost race. (See DDogains: 2006, Creaton:2004, obruszkes: 2006).

E-Commerce

E-commerce refers to all forms of business activities conducted across the internet. This can include E-tailing, B2B, intranets and extranets, online advertising (e.g.. advertising banners), and simply online presences of any form that are used for some type of communication (customer service for example). (Definition cited from http://www.learnthat.com). E-commerce has several advantages and disadvantages at present. Some of its advantages include larger markets, no taxes, no dealing with traffic on the road or rude sales men, wide range to explore before buying or selling. On the other hand, some of its disadvantages are that you can’t “feel” the product before buying, there is a question of security and a question of reliability on the buyer/seller. This being said, there are a lot of deeper issues affecting e-commerce at present that might be preventing it from growing. For example, all online stores at present are struggling to build their return policies such that it doesnt drive customers away. According to BizRate, 85% of online customers agree that the inability to receive credit on a credit or debit card, might refrain a customer from shopping online

(http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/retailing/article/0,1323,6061_274891,00.html).

Secondly, some aspects of e-commerce attract a lot of people to shop online. For example, online customer service has proven to be very appealing to customers. And finally, some ground-breaking technologies have been developed such as Verifi, DigiScent and TouchSense that have some really exciting capabilities. These technologies will be explained in the fourth paragraph. E-commerce has grown rapidly over the past couple of years. In 1998, e-commerce contributed $18 billion to the economy, whereas in 2002, this number grew to $294 billion (http://mason.gmu.edu/~gmalloy/stat.html). Even though e-commerce is growing rapidly, it is still in its childhood, like the internet once was, and a lot of obstacles need to be overcome and a lot of advancements made before e-commerce can be as widespread and as successful as the internet.

Present Challenges Facing E-Commerce

Speaking of obstacles, there are a lot of them that need to be uprooted before e-commerce can compete with traditional commerce. The biggest obstacle in the course of advancement of e-commerce is that the consumer's senses are limited to seeing and hearing the product. This factor is the most important factor that has hindered the growth of e-commerce to a large extent and has prevented it from competing with traditional commerce, in which there are no sensory limitations for the consumer. The second largest problem that e-commerce has been facing over the past few years is that of security. Traditional buyers and sellers are still paranoid about conducting business online. According to Hal Loevy, vice president of Global Marketing and Partnerships for SGSonSITE, "Despite all the noise about e-commerce, which is significant, companies still have to keep their old business practices: Can I trust who I am buying from? Who am I doing business with? What is their trading history? Am I obeying the law? Will I receive the goods as specified on screen and who do I approach if I have a problem?". According to emarketer.com, "70% of US consumers are concerned about online security; this discourages consumers from using credit cards to shop online (PaymentOne)". Also according to e-marketer.com, in December 2001, 91% of websites collected personal information and in April-May 2001, 68% of US internet users were concerned that transactions may not be secure and other companies and individuals might gain access to their personal information. Considering all these statistics on security, there is no question that e-commerce has to remedy this in order to advance. According to Hal Loevy, one solution to this problem of security is making some basic standards for doing business on the internet. His company, for example SGS, has recently formed a Forum for Trust in Online Trade. This company provides a blue, silver or gold seal to e-companies depending on how much it trusts the company. If they provide a gold seal to company, they are saying that they take full responsibility for transactions with that company. This company has 30,000 employees worldwide. Another institution that is concerned with sercurity online is the Federal Trade Comission. "In addition to taking action against companies suspected of engaging in unfair business practices, the FTC has worked to shape Internet policy in a range of areas, including online disputes and resolutions, Internet-based fraud and privacy concerns". This institution however, has only 1100 employees, about 70% of them in Washington D.C

. Advatages

Looking at the brighter side
however, e-commerce obviously has numerous advantages over traditional commerce, the number one advantage being convenience of use. The user can browse online stores, compare prices and order merchandise sitting at home on their PC. This provides considerable advantages over traditional commerce such as no taxes, no dealing with salesmen and access to a large market and a wide range of products without getting out of your comfortable chair. Apart from these obvious advantages, e-commerce also provides some other specific features, which gives it an edge over traditional commerce. One such feature is online customer service. According to Forrester, 37 percent of online consumers use customer service more from Web retailers than traditional retailers because of its potential for ease of use and quick response times. These consumers also appreciate the ability to seek customer service from their homes. The preferred method for consumers to resolve their customer service issues is e-mail, Forrester found, with the telephone the favorite best method. Web shoppers excpect customer service on each step of the way, therefore having a good infrastructure for customer service can certainly help the company in succeeding. "Once excellent proactive customer service is in place, merchants must build their brands around the promise of a satisfying experience," said Forrester's Christopher Kelley. "This means not only advertising a call center but also bragging about speedy response times and knowledgeable service reps". Dell, for example has adopted the same approach to selling their products both online and offline. They have an excellent website (http://www.dell.com), that provides the customers with each and every small detail that they need to know in order to make a purchase. E-commerce and commerce over telephone, are the main reasons for the companies success today. One reason why the company is so successful today is that they do not make their products until they receive orders, therefore there is usually a shipping time of 10-12 days depending on the customers location. This however, has proven beneficial for the company, since it helped them cut down on warehousing costs. One way in which the company has encouraged online ordering is by offering rebates on the products that are bought online. Other companies should follow Dell's example if they want to succeed in the online world.

Some recent technological breakthroughs

Finally, in order to make the online shopping experience even more better, there are a lot of new technologies like Verifi, DigiScent's iSmell and TouchSense that have emerged over the last couple of years. Even though iSmell and TouchSense are very new technologies and they haven't been adopted by the majority of internet shoppers yet, they promise a consumer-friendly future. Verifi is one technology that has been widely adopted today, and for good reason. According to a recent BizRate study, over 50% of online shoppers stated that they would not make further purchases from a Web merchant that delivered an item in a colour that wasn't what they expected. This is the problem that Imation have designed their Verifi system to solve. Here's how it works. When a shopper visits a Verifi-enabled Web site for the first time they are invited to take a Web based survey that establishes how their monitor, computer, operating system and browser handle colour. This information in then stored as a cookie in the shopper's browser. Then, when they view a product image, the Verifi system reads the information in the cookie and combines this with the profile of the scanner (or digital camera etc.) that the merchant used to produce the image to generate a colour-accurate image in the shopper's browser. To conclude, e-commerce is still at a very young stage. In order to advance, the obstacles such as credit card acceptability, vulnerability of data misuse and sensory limitations need to be overcome. Also technological advancements need to be made, in order for e-commerce to progress. If these steps are taken, commerce on the web will eventually become as popular as traditional commerce.