Note: This file has moved to notablog.

Subject: Re: WC:>: What is "E-Commerce"? Gary Almes writes: > I think e-commerce has so many potential meanings and implications that you > have to define it on a case by case basis. Simply put, it's probably safe > to say that e-commerce is any internet-driven operation involving the > transfer of funds in exchange for goods and/or services. True. I was looking more to the specific usage that seems to be so prevalent in the media and marketing literature of the last six months. > But as your question points out, there's a lot of middle ground. E-commerce > can include shopping carts, credit card verification/authorization, > back-end database integration, integration with inventory and fulfillment > systems, interaction with online banking and/or "cybercash" types of > accounts, data encryption (SSL, etc.) and probably many more things that I > haven't thought of. Certainly SSL is a necessary component of E-commerce, but it's distinct from e-commerce itself; most decent hosts provide SSL servers anyway. Though if somebody were to produce a vertical e-commerce server they'd have to include SSL. What are "fulfillment systems"? Unless you're operating a company where you provide marketing, etc and simply resell(*), then the fulfillment system needs to be a vertical application similar to a point-of-sale system or an inventory-management system. How do you integrate this in any company smaller than a major corporation (which might be expected to maintain their own connectivity, server hardware, software, and back-end databases)? Most smaller vertical systems are heavily proprietary, usually running on some arcane OS or maybe even DOS. The few UNIX-based vertical systems I've come across (I don't consider myself widely experienced in this area) were in odd, cryptic, specialized versions of BASIC or FORTRAN, with bit-field coded databases. An example would be where you're hosting a site full of book reviews with the option to purchase, and outsource the fulfillment to amazon.com. Or another example, you operate a travel agency site with cross-selling to various related services, with each service maintained by a separate company with their own web-based ordering system; your system provides options to order the related service, then goes out to the related site and posts for the user. > For the amazon.coms of the Web, you're talking six figures and LOTS of > dedicated support staff, redundant servers, all kinds of stuff. No kidding; one of my friends interviewed at Amazon before taking a job at Star Media (a very highly capitalized web portal that's specializing in being "The Brazillian AOL", so to speak). Amazon had (last year) about 200 full-time Perl programmers maintaining their systems. Of course that begs the question of how *good* those programmers are...