E Commerce

Literature Review
There are a lot of literature materials which discuss basically all the aspects of e-commerce. A lot of reviews, studies, analysis, and surveys were already formulated by market research firms and organisations with direct interests in the e-commerce business. In this research however, related literature materials which were included were those that mostly concern the business processes and methodologies employed in the use of e-commerce.
This section is structured accordingly. First, there is a brief discussion about the definition of e-commerce. Then a justification of e-commerce as a business methodology and its benefits is presented. Different e-commerce applications, issues, and legal concerns were discussed next.
Definitions of E-commerce
There are many confusing definitions of e-commerce. Some see e-commerce as Internet-based activities only while others include any kinds of exchanges of resources (electronic information, applications, methodologies, and strategies). There is one thing common to all of these sets of general definitions however: e-commerce is a process where electronic connections make it possible to exchange resources.
E-commerce is a very broad term used to describe modern ways of doing business today. If we take a much broader view, we define e-commerce as the use of the computer to facilitate all of the firm's operations, many of which are internal. These operations are performed within the firm by the functional areas of finance, human resources, information services, manufacturing, and marketing (McLeod, 1998). Finance mainly deals with the financial community, stockholders and owners, and the firm's customers. Human resources have a special interest in the global community and labor unions, and information services interface with hardware and software suppliers. Manufacturing is responsible for dealing with the firm's suppliers and labor unions....