Different Options For Conducting Commerce Online

Where do you start when you to conduct trading and business online? There are different options. Before the coming of electronic commerce, companies had to make trade-offs when choosing channels for buying and selling goods. There was not any single, powerful, effective and economical way to market products to, or source products from, a global community of interested buyers and sellers. Today, the scenario has changed and there are several options.
Thanks to an emergence of online platforms and pervasive connectivity offered by the World Wide Web, companies can now engage in virtually every type of commercial transaction. By using these platforms, companies can generate leads, convert online interactions into revenue-producing relationships, reduce, competitively their market share. And all of these be done 24 X 7 all throught out the year with minimal investment.
There are basically four online platforms that companies can use to involve in business:
* Web presence: Simple web sites promote product and brand awareness. Usually they provide information like catalogs and marketing literature. They lack built-in commerce capabilities. They cannot attracting enough visitors or generate qualified sales leads and therefore can produce only indirect financial benefits. Buyers have to perform their own research to find these sites.
* Web storefronts: Many second or third-generation web sites have the capabilities to take order. The web storefronts have the capability to generate direct financial benefits. But then the benefits wont be gainful if the flow of visitors is less. The burden in such a case is on prospective purchasers to find these sites. Usually rather than being business-oriented, they are customer-oriented.
* Supply chain applications: Companies adopt supply chain applications whether through extranets or virtual private networks to strengthen their ties with buyers and suppliers. These permit one-to-one commercial transactions with the present partners, but are not designed to enhance an audience or to market products or to generate new sources of revenue.
* B2B marketplaces: B2B marketplaces are business-oriented online platforms where buyers and sellers can meet to transact business. They create and support wide communities of interested suppliers and purchasers. With little investment, B2B marketplaces allow buyers and sellers to reduce their purchasing and sales overhead and increase their efficiency

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