Following the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines
Automated Systems, Efficiency and E-commerce Applications
Automation has brought a new dimension to the process in the industry sector. The business and the factories have started using automated systems and they could be able to decrease the amount of labor hours in the production by using computerized systems. Computerized systems brings new advantages to the producers and the business using it; 1) Productivity increase, 2) Ensuring a level of quality in goods and services, 3) Ensuring a consistency in production processes of products and goods, 4) Decrease in the costs of labor. However, there are some disadvantages in using automated systems; 1) Vulnerability of the automated systems, 2) High cost of running an automated system, 3) Initial costs to automate processes.
When a company decides on automating its production process, the managers should take these pros and cons of automation. If automation is rationally developed, a company gains many qualitative plusses and a loss in its production costs.
E-commerce is an automated online system which replaces physical sale services. Physical marketing activities require relatively high amount of labor cost and other expenses such as advertisement, cost of labor transportation. Also we can say that when we use more labor, we might have difficulty to provide a certain level of service quality or in another word, the quality service depends on individual workers which means you need to keep training your workers to increase the efficiency at work. However automation for trade might have high initial costs and running costs.
A company has to pay more attention to optimize the cost of a transition to automated systems and if this company can manage this process, it can possible to provide better services with less costs.
Research and development of e-commerce
In 1960s, American Airline and IBM started using automated systems. In the following times and after the internet has become worldwide, companies has started creating web pages for their business and interactive applications through these web applications. In the early times, companies have provided a way to their customers to learn about the products online. After interactive applications starting from giving contact information and information on their products online to online shopping, in recent times, online shopping is a way of shopping which people prefers. In the developed and developing countries, a large customer group is preferring online shopping to physical shopping, because in online shopping; you do not have to go to a store and get tired, you do not have to pay extra for the extra costs of physical marketing such as high rents, high labor cost etc., and you can find a large variety of products online easily. Only suspicious thing was the safety problems in online shopping, however, in our modern times computer engineers are able to create a safe environment for online shopping.
In recent times, we also see that international e-commerce web pages have a large volume of trade continuing on them. These kind of international e-commerce sites has many services to their customers starting from informing the web page users about trade between countries, trade barriers, trade procedures to buying and selling their products in a healthy online environment.
Nowadays, we have many companies using online interactive applications including e-commerce. The high demand for such kind of applications has brought a group of academicians and professionals working on the R&D in e-commerce applications. Also some special very large e-commerce companies also supporting this development.
The R&D works will enable us to create new techniques in e-commerce which satisfies the producers, the traders and the customers with better applications bringing easiness to our lives at low costs.
E-commerce Types
The developing e-commerce is also creating its new types in time. The kinds we know in our time is given as following: Business to business, Business to Consumer, Consumer to Consumer.
Business-To-BusinessMany companies, nowadays, can use e-commerce applications to buy/sell their raw materials, machineries, semi-products internationally. A company manager can go online and finds his companies needs with detailed information with the least costs and order them easily. By using this, the company does not need to hire many people for purchasing products. The same easiness is also true for the seller companies. With e-commerce applications, wholesale processes are cheaper and also less costly.
Business-To-ConsumerProducers or other intermediating companies can sell products to customers directly and easily to their last customers without paying any fee for intermediation. If a company can create and manage e-commerce applications well, then this company can get rid of many costs. Also we see that many companies also providing after-sale services to their customers with online applications.
Consumer-To-Consumer
Not only companies are using the e-commerce applications, but also consumers are using it. We have many online sites that you can sell the used products and other products produced individually online. Such sites have a large number of subscribed members who are active users. Even we observe that some people are specialized in online shopping by selling used products online.
Result
E-commerce is developing everyday and in 2011, the sales volume is 680.6 Billion USD, it is still expected that e-commerce applications, technology and volume of trade through e-commerce will develop.
Considering that the technological developments will be transferred to e-commerce applications, we might expect very shocking new applications in e-commerce.
References
Advantages and Disadvantages of E-Commerce,
http://www.manjeetss.com/articles/advantagesdisadvantagesecommerce.html.
Amsterdam, J., 1993, Automated Qualitative Modeling of Dynamic Physical Systems, PhD Dissertation, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/ftp/amsterdam/AITR-1412.pdf.
Barkley, D., Markley, D.M., Lamie, R. D., 2007, E-Commerce as A Business Strategy: Lessons Learned From Case Studies of Rural And Small Town Businesses, Working Paper, Clemson University.
Ebusiness and its Advantages, http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/e-business-advantages/.
Handbook of Human Factors & Ergonomics, second edition, G. Salvendy (Ed.), Wiley, 1997
Olson, M. H. and Lucas, H. Jr.,1982, The Impact of Office Automation on the Organization: Some Implications or Research and Practice, Social Impacts of Computing, V. 25, N.11.
