Keeping an electronic commerce shop

Abstract

s Selling goods and services successfully over the Internet requires all of the skills and ingenuity of a shopkeeper plus a basic and evolving understanding of local and international laws, regulations , and behavior patterns, which seem to be in a long-term rapid development cycle and thus require close attention. Electronic shopkeepers and those who support them do well to watch domestic and international developments in the following seven areas of particularly fast-paced change: ● privacy ● security ● intellectual property ● localization/internationalization ● taxation ● export/import ● usability he articles in this issue of StandardView were selected to explore some of these seven areas in detail. Not all of the areas could be addressed; e-commerce is still very much in development and, while experience is getting more common, expertise is rare. Several of the areas have yet to establish formal standards that specifically apply to e-commerce; for others, standards are either newly available or are just being drafted. Each area will see extraordinary activity in the near future toward discussing, creating, or evolving de facto or de jure standards. In addition to these developing areas, existing and broader standards, such as XML, TickIT, and ISO9000, are being applied to e-commerce. There are many definitions for e-commerce. The working definition for this article isϺ " any commercial transaction that starts or ends with the Internet. " Any product, whether physical or electronic, can be sold using e-commerce mechanisms. E-commerce includes: ● electronic distribution with electronic sales and telesales ● free, prerelease, and released products ● product fixes and upgrades ● try-and-buy electronic software distribution ● electronic ordering with physical fulfillment ● electronic sales of subscriptions ● electronic marketing with telesales follow-up ● free and lower-cost distribution to educational customers ● business-to-consumer ● business-to-business