E-Business: The First Wave of Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce has revolutionized the value chains of nearly every industry, regardless if their focus is on business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and the extent of their distribution networks prior to the pervasive adoption of the Web. Many of the initial studies of e-commerce credited the Internet and the invention of the Hypertext Transfer Protocols with the flexibility of creating web pages that could easily be used for e-marketing and promotion (Rose, Hair, Clark, 2011). Only after the initial generation of e-commerce businesses had experienced the challenges of synchronizing their entire value chains to the new, demanding and time-critical needs of consumers online in the case of B2C and the speed of transactions and scalability challenges in B2B e-business make system and process integration a priority.

e-Business drove the need for much greater levels of integration standards and clarity of communication across...
[ View Full Essay]