The Impacts of Introducing an E-Commerce System to an Organisation

The impacts of introducing an e-commerce system to the organisation are followed:

• Organisation can carry out their business without concerning about time and distance. Customer just can log in to organisation’s website whenever they wish to and purchase in single mouse click.
• Organisation eliminates processing errors; make it faster and convenient for the visitor.
• Organisation can sell their services/products directly to customers while cutting the costs of traditional retailing method. E.g. E-tailer does not have to spend so much on an expensive high street company.
• Organisation can reach much wider customers; which means organisation can sell their products/services worldwide rather than being limited to one place.
• Requires low running cost compare to introducing business on land based.
• Helps organisation to reduce the delivery time, labour cost and the cost incurred in various area such as document preparation, error detection and correction, reconciliation, mail preparation, telephone calling, supervision expenses etc.

The risks of introducing an e-commerce system to an organisation:

• Risk to organisation information and intellectual property from internal staff and trading partners. It is difficult to control how sensitive information will be handled by third parties or contract workers.
• Hacker exploitation could cause errors in software applications design, technical implementation or system operation.
• System could be subject virus attack which may cause non-deliberate alteration on organisation images or web messages. Hence organisation will face embarrassment and damage to business reputation.
• Credit card payment fraud.
• Malicious attack from inside or outside the organisation.
• Technical failure or infrastructure failure which could put halt on the business. Organisation could lose customers hence revenue until system get back on