E-commerce and Online Business Reference

Dylan Sun asked:




Over the past few decades international trade and e-commerce have grown at a phenomenal rate combined with rising import/export and global sourcing policies. International trade also took place long time back even when there were not advanced telecommunications or other networks and goods were exchanged in import/export in those days. With the advancement of technology the impetus given to import/export of trade and global sourcing was tremendous and one of the latest tools in the armour is that of e-commerce. Basically e-commerce refers to the carrying out of trade by use of electronic media mainly the internet for doing international trade, import/export and global sourcing. Obviously the advantages of this are many and will be discussed separately in a different article but it should be sufficient to know at this stage that various activities related to import/export, global sourcing, international trade and procurement and sales of goods and services comes under the purview of e-commerce mainly because of the ease of communication and the wide and extensive reach it provides, combined with huge savings both in terms of time as well as money, which together constitute one of the biggest factors in the life of any business or organisation.

The range of businesses which are involved in active utilisation of e-commerce is quite broad and includes those of e-banking, e-logistics, offshore manufacturing to name a few. It can be noticed that the common factor amongst most of these is the ‘e’ which stands as an acronym for the word ‘electronic’. Nevertheless it must be kept in mind that more often than not, the word electronic refers to the medium of internet and other networks, when the current times of e-commerce, import/export, global sourcing and international trade are considered. In fact the term has become so popular now that even small scale individual entrepreneurs are utilising the technology of e-commerce to carry out international trade, import/export and global sourcing targets.

Last but not least it can be concluded that e-commerce has made the world a global village where tasks like import/export, global sourcing and international trade which were hitherto quite tedious, costly and time consuming to carry out, are not done within the flick of an eye at relatively much lower costs. It is hoped that in the times to come the technology of e-commerce will prosper even more and will contribute much more to the carrying out of international trade between various nations, global sourcing to find out the best suited commodity or service at the most reasonable price and import/export of goods and services freely across the border making the earth a single unit at least commercially speaking if not politically.

Jane Grath asked:




Oasis Business Solutions (P) Ltd. (Oasis – India) is an offshore Indian IT company having strategic partnership with Oasis Softwares Limited Oasis – UK), an UK based Software Consultancy for information technology solutions and services.

IT Resources of Oasis have handled multiple projects in the field of Client/Sever Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence which include both technical and business consulting. Strong domain expertise, extensive technology skills, process focus of our resources and offshore partners enable us to provide value-added, high quality IT solutions to customers

We are expertise in Web Designing and development,Application Design, IT solutions, Internet Marketing Services etc. with highly experienced team.

Check our portfolio -

http://www.oasis-bs.com/common/portfolio/websites.aspx

Check our recent work -

http://www.oasis-bs.com/common/recent_work.aspx

We have resources who achieved rich experience of serving customers across a host of verticals has helped us build vast technical competence, as well as functional expertise to understand the business imperatives. Enabling us to design best-fit solutions for our customers.

With its thrust of quality products and speedy turnaround, Oasis business solutions looks forward to years of operation and will be marketed as one of the world’s foremost intelligent provider of outsourced content contributing to the offshore information technology business process outsourcing support industry.

Skills -

Web technologies

Software application & solutions

Data warehouse

IT consulting services

Dedicated offshore resource

Offshore development center etc.

We have the expertise and strengths in the following fields:

Software Analysis and Design

Software Upgrade

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Web Development

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E-Commerce Applications

Oasis can support your needs in a variety of different areas and technical specialties. We are focused on offering top class custom software development service at reasonable prices.

Read Full Article : Outsourcing Software Company

vijay asked:




Think of eCommerce and the first few features that strike any mind are – a global marketplace – increased sales – increased profits! Not that you start claiming better margin of profit online, but because various expenses relating to marketing, promotional material, order processing, customer care, inventory management, information storage, telecommunications et al, considerably slash down.

eCommerce offers tempting but economical boost to any size or kind of business. By opting for eCommerce, you can expand your market margins to global horizons or squeeze them to highly focused market segments, as per subjective business acumen and discretion. Even a small-scale business offering quality and reliability with confidence can easily find itself brushing shoulders with its esteemed competitors in least gestation period. It facilitates wishful manifestation of your business entity – as grand and sophisticated as you wish it to be. Budget would not really restrain you here from showcasing your attitude and essence through your website and online shopping cart.

Things considerably simplify with eCommerce – be it changing prices listed on your web page or customization of products; applying innovative business models or business process re-engineering; implementing higher degree of specialization or enhancing productivity and customer care – everything hardly takes time to implement/ incorporate and exhibit.

Not to mention, quality eCommerce services collect and manage valuable customer-related information, including customer’s ordering patterns, to build a comprehensive customer database. This database vitally sharpens your marketing and promotion strategies to be remarkably on target.

As regards your business partners, eCommerce aids you in minimizing supply chain inefficiencies, bringing about reduced inventory requirement and lessened delivery delays, thereby rendering you more confident about your business collaborations with your suppliers and service companies. eCommerce inherently streamlines and automates the entire backend business process, assimilating speed and efficiency to your business activities.

As you introduce eCommerce facility to your customers, you render their shopping experience highly fluent and convenient. eCommerce seems all the more indispensable for your customers in the wake of consistently shrinking time with them to spare for shopping offline. What’s more, online shopping lets your customers reap benefits of online economies, as they often pay lesser price for identical products/ services available offline.

eCommerce-based business benefits the society as well! As your onsite manpower requirement reduces, it lessens the burden on infrastructure and lowers demand for elaborate office complexes and spacious parking lots.

As good as it may sound, eCommerce has its own share of obstacles too that hold it back from assuming it’s full potential. To begin with, Internet in itself is still to touch the lives of a large chunk of people as an integral way of life. There are tangible privacy and security issues that keep people on guard, as they face a dilemma each time they need to divulge highly personal information online, as and when they transact online.

Non-standardized protocols for certain processes, insufficient telecommunications bandwidth and ever-evolving software tools (with incrementing versions), are some of the technical issues that contain eCommerce from being a seamlessly integrated component of the contemporary organizational IT systems.

While technical limitations are completely resolvable, non-technical issues including people’s resistance to change and lack of trust for faceless and paperless transactions, is bound to take its due time before it completely erodes. In fact, eCommerce is fast catching up with the rest of the world, as USA online markets lead them by example.

Charlene Fin asked:




In this days of Open source ecommerce, After the power Magento, I got to know of another opensource ecommerce shopping cart software which seemed to inline with Magento’s principles of offering a top-notch ecommerce software for free and I have had the pleasure to test drive – and install in production environment – Prestashop, a simpler alternative, that serves ecommerce with a nice ajax animated shopping cart and various interesting features.

1)      Prestashop and Magento both e-commerce solutions are available under Open Software License (OSL).

2)      Prestashop Installation requirements are Depends on GD library of PHP. For magento installation need a lot of extensions like PDO, CURL etc…

3)      As per as functionality concern functional features like Customer groups ,Wish list, product comparison, RSS feed, TAG in magento e-commerce. Multiple store control is also a powerful feature of magento.  On the other hand statistics and membership these two functional features are available in prestashop e-commerce. For more functionality and features you can also hire magento programmer.

4)      There are not proper shipping and payment modules or any label printing option in prestashop. Magento contain all these features.

5)      Prestashop adopt smarty template engine based on PHP 5. If you see the code of prestashop you can find the code is much more, for it adopts smarty template, and increase the workload of extending development. Magento adopt Zend framework, not smarty template engine. For the programmer who is making extending development, they not only need to master PHP, but also need to handle Zend framework.

6)      Prestashop’s create impressive effect on search.  The search on their frontend appears faster than magento and is based on score to bring in relevance of search.

7)      Magento is much SEO friendly than prestashop.

8)      In the prestashop the upgrade strategy is not clearly defined.  The upgrade impact on existing customizations is unsure in prestashop. On the other hand Magento’s customization scheme depends on the excellent OOP concept of subclasses and method. And this is extensively useful in keeping the customizations apart from Magento’s main releases.

9)      As mention above prestashop uses a smarty template system and javascript based on Jquery so the complete OOP coding offers a lot of flexibility for design. Magento’s design seems to be difficult than prestashop so don’t bother much with magento design.

10)   Flip side, the back office of Magento is less intuitive and technical structure it required more specialized skills for any adjustment.

11)   Magento Community have 130,000 members, Prestashop have 30000 members Community. Some approaches like magento team involvement, video tutorial, screen casts are work behind the wonderful magento community.

Angulo Fu asked:




Only two decades ago, China was a poor agricultural country; now it becomes the third-largest economy in the world, with a GDP of more than $2, 108 billion in 2006. Experts forecast that by 2020, China will be the world’s largest economy.

1, China’s pharmaceutical market

The has shown impressive growth in recent years, in tandem with the country’s rapid economic expansion. In the past twenty years, China’s pharmaceutical market has an averaging between 18 – 20% growth, significantly higher than US and European growth during that period (7 – 9%). The total pharmaceutical market is expected to grow to $27.7 billion by the year 2005, to become the world’s largest pharmaceutical market by 2020.

2, China’s pharmaceutical industry

China has a large domestic pharmaceutical industry, providing 80% of China’s pharmaceutical consumption. In 1995, approximately 3,000 domestic state pharmaceutical enterprises produced a total output of $12 billion, of which more than $3 billion was exported, according to the State Pharmaceutical Administration of China (SPAC). The Chinese pharmaceutical industry has increased in value with an annual average growth rate of 16.72% over the last few decades.

However, the industry is still small-scale, with a scattered geographical layout, duplicated production processes, and outdated manufacturing technology and management structure. The Chinese pharmaceutical industry also has a lower market concentration and weak international trading competitiveness, coupled with a lack of patented pharmaceuticals developed in-house.

As China joins the World Trade Organization (WTO), it needs to integrate more completely into the global economy. The international competition will place an intense pressure on the Chinese pharmaceutical industry and further open the door to a lucrative market for non-Chinese companies, especially for pharmaceutical producers and manufacturers. Accession to the WTO binds China by fundamental WTO principles, such as improved transparency and the strengthening of commercial legal procedures. China’s WTO commitments include the tightening of rules on intellectual property, tariff concessions, and market access of non-Chinese service suppliers engaging in the distribution of pharmaceuticals. All such moves create additional business opportunities for non-Chinese pharmaceutical companies in China, and in turn, place an intense pressure on the Chinese pharmaceutical industry.

So, over the past few years, Chinese pharmaceutical firms have been merging to improve economies of scale, concentrate resources, and increase competitiveness through vertical integration. Many large, state-owned pharmaceutical companies are also transforming their ownership structures into joint ventures or public companies to become more efficient. According to the SPAC, China aims to become the world’s leading producer of pharmaceuticals and medical devices and instruments in the first half of this century.

3, China’s pharmaceutical foreign trade

In recent years, many Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises take part in the international pharmaceutical market. They not only export patent medicine but also assist their global partners in shortening the cycle and lowering the cost of drug discovery and development by providing cost-effective and efficient outsourcing solutions, for example, pharmaceutical intermediate. Some Chinese pharmaceutical companies even appear in the Nasdaq market successfully, such as WuXi PharmaTech (WX.NYSE) and Simcere Pharmaceutical Group (SCR) etc.

Electronic commerce is introduced to the pharmaceutical enterprises. is one of the most famous B2B website in China. It provides various trade leads including pharmaceutical information among China factory, manufacturers, suppliers, and global buyers.

The pharmaceutical trade shows supply the platform to the leading manufacturers, suppliers and buyers both at home and abroad. Many pharmaceutical companies attend the China International Medical Equipment Fair (CMEF), China International Oral Care Technology & Equipment Exhibition and Shanghai International Medical Equipment and Furnishment Exhibition ?IMEFE? and so on. CMEF is Asia Pacific’s biggest exhibition serving the entire value chain for the medical devices market. China International Oral Care Technology & Equipment Exhibition is organized by the China Oral Care Industry Association, Exhibition Center of China Light Industry. The Show covers oral care products, raw and auxiliary materials, packaging materials, manufacturing and packaging equipment, oral medical equipment and materials.

4, China’s pharmaceutical market trend

First, the price of pharmaceutical products will continue to decrease steadily. In June 2004, the price of 400 antibiotics in 24 categories, including penicillin, was reduced by, on average, 35%. The total value affected by this reduction was US$42 million. The central government has been playing a significant role in pharmaceutical price readjustment. According to industry experts, future price reductions will originate from hospital pharmaceutical retail shops.

Secondly, the rural pharmaceutical market will shift significantly. According to Information Times, 80% of counterfeit products are consumed in rural areas. This provides a huge opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to develop the market in rural areas.

Thirdly, China will become the largest pharmaceutical R&D base in the world. In recent years, more and more western pharmaceutical enterprises, such as GSK, Roche, Novo Nordisk, etc, have come to China and set up R&D centers. Twenty world leading pharmaceutical companies have established joint venture manufactories in China. Some have even set up sole propriety manufactories. Currently, amongst the largest 500 overseas enterprises, 14 of them are pharmaceutical companies.

The fourth trend is that foreign enterprises will begin an OTC price war in future years. Based on expert analysis, foreign enterprises have been closely monitoring the expanding OTC market. In September 2003, German Mike Company began its OTC project in China.

arvind asked:




Today, all over the world, billions of money is being spent to run online marketing webpages and there are numerous people who earn their share of livelihood solely from this source. With shopping going online, a great transition has come in people too. The comfort level for people has increased with products coming to your house with a mouse click. The concept of purchase and sale of products over the web has definitely gained much success and thus before starting an e-commerce business, you must take care of certain points.

You could choose to sell any product over the World Wide Web and cater to any section of the society. The key factor here is to assess which e-commerce website design and development solution will help you with successful website development. Below are a few checkpoints to consider for website development:

Web Hosting

When you get web hosting done, you must consider what all the web hosting company is offering you besides a domain name. It is only when they offer good tools for e-commerce such as shopping carts and calculators for shipping charges etc. that the money is worth it.

Choice of Software

When you pay a web hosting company to book a domain, you also need to consider the software he offers you. You must see if the software of any use to your website. Usually it takes a lot of investment to hire a developer and get custom software for the website. Instead find a web hosting company that offers you software for development along with hosting. The kind of softwares provided by web hosting companies are user friendly. One can drag and drop files and images to give shape to your website.

Reliable Web Host

You must attend to the fact that servers of most web hosts remain down. Thus find a reliable web host that remains up most of the times and thus fare well for your e-commerce business.

Right Ecommerce website design and development are provided by a good interactive web design agency. They offer you exactly what your business needs and makes your task easy. Your online store is thus successful and does very well.