Electronic Commerce Technology
Read this chapter to learn about the technologies that support e-business and e-commerce. Although this chapter was written in 2008, think about instances in your own experiences where more recent technologies have made e-commerce/e-business faster, less expensive, more reliable, and more secure. Create a small chart of some important items you purchase frequently. Label the columns "Item", "Purchase Frequency", "How first purchased" (such as at a store, over the phone, online, etc.), "Most recent purchase date", and "Purchase method". Notice the changes. Have you evolved into an e-commerce/e-business user?
Infrastructure
Electronic commerce is built on top of a number of different technologies. These various technologies created a layered, integrated infrastructure that permits the development and deployment of electronic commerce applications (see Exhibit 9). Each layer is founded on the layer below it and cannot function without it.
Exhibit 5.: Electronic commerce infrastructure
National information infrastructure
This layer is the bedrock of electronic commerce because all traffic must be transmitted by one or more of the communication networks comprising the national information infrastructure (NII). The components of an NII include the TV and radio broadcast industries, cable TV, telephone networks, cellular communication systems, computer networks, and the Internet. The trend in many countries is to increase competition among the various elements of the NII to increase its overall efficiency because it is believed that an NII is critical to the creation of national wealth.
Message distribution infrastructure
This layer consists of software for sending and receiving messages. Its purpose is to deliver a message from a server to a client. For example, it could move an HTML file from a Web server to a client running Netscape. Messages can be unformatted (e.g., e-mail) or formatted (e.g., a purchase order). Electronic data interchange (EDI), e-mail, and hypertext text transfer protocol (HTTP) are examples of messaging software.
Electronic publishing infrastructure
Concerned with content, the Web is a very good example of this layer. It permits organizations to publish a full range of text and multimedia. There are three key elements of the Web:
- A uniform resource locator (URL), which is used to uniquely identify any server;
- A network protocol;
- A structured markup language, HTML.
Notice that the electronic publishing layer is still concerned with some of the issues solved by TCP/IP for the
Internet part of the NII layer. There is still a need to consider addressability (i.e., a URL) and have a common
language across the network (i.e., HTTP and HTML). However, these are built upon the previous layer, in the case
of a URL, or at a higher level, in the case of HTML.
Business services infrastructure
The principal purpose of this layer is to support common business processes. Nearly every business is concerned
with collecting payment for the goods and services it sells. Thus, the business services layer supports secure
transmission of credit card numbers by providing encryption and electronic funds transfer. Furthermore, the
business services layer should include facilities for encryption and authentication (see See Security).
Electronic commerce applications
Finally, on top of all the other layers sits an application. Consider the case of a book seller with an on-line
catalog (see Exhibit 6). The application is a book catalog; encryption is used to protect a customer's credit card
number; the application is written in HTML; HTTP is the messaging protocol; and the Internet physically
transports messages between the book seller and customer.
Exhibit 6. An electronic commerce application
| Electronic commerce applications | Book catalog |
| Business services infrastructure | Encryption |
| Electronic publishing infrastructure | HTML |
| Message distribution infrastructure | HTTP |
| National information infrastructure | Internet |