Advantage Disadvantages of e Business

As with any other businesses, there are sure to have advantage disadvantages of e business. In order to stay competitive and being more effective, a business should really look into the electronic medium as an additional channel to conduct and grow the business.

What are the pros and cons of e-business?

Advantage Disadvantages of e Business : The Advantage

Electronic business, commonly referred to as “eBusiness” or “e-business”, may be defined as the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of all business activities.

The advantage of e-business are:

* Global Presence
* Business 24 x 7 x 365
* Speed
* Worldwide Market
* Cost Effective
* Time Savings
* Competitive Advantages
* Geographical Freedom
* Better Customer Service
* Computer platform-independent

As we already know, it is the setup of computer hardware and software system that enables the implementation of e-business. With the advance technology, people can now communicate over the internet in real-time, thus savings a lot of cost in travelling to meetup and perform a business activity.
This increase the speed to conduct businesses indirectly.

‘Many, if not most, computers have the ability to communicate via the Internet independent of operating systems and hardware. Customers are not limited by existing hardware systems’ (Gascoyne & Ozcubukcu, 1997:87).

As such, business that setup an e-business channel will be able to serve their customer better, and a good support system that utilize global support team will ensure a 24/7 availability thus increasing the overall business image in customer support.

By putting the business to the web, the global presence could be felt and thus open up possibilities for business to capture the global market, or to participate in worldwide marketplace.

Some of the activities that could be carried out with e-business system will take away the traditional location restriction, provide the business a geographical freedom thus increase the competitive advantage compared to the competitors that don’t look into this part of business tools.

As this article is a more general discussion of advantage disadvantages of e business, you can check out the advantages of extranets for businesses for more info.

Advantage Disadvantages of e Business : The Disadvantage

As many things in life, there will be some disadvantages in e-business even given with above mentioned advantages.

The disadvantages of e-business includes:

- sectorial limitation
- high setup cost
- costly maintenance
- security concern
- virus threat
- physical products constrain
- perishable goods
- privacy
- payment
- identity
- contract
- governing laws

Perhaps the most noticable of the disadvantages of e-business is the involvement of perishable goods and product delivery concerns. People prefer to shop in the conventional way than to use e-commerce for purchasing food products. The time period required for delivering physical products can also be quite significant in case of e-commerce. A lot of phone calls and e-mails may be required till a customer get his/her desired products.

The second most obvious disadvantage of e-business is security concern and threat of computer virus attack, due to it’s global exposure and 24/7 availability. There are still many people that do not trust the security of purchasing online. However, the new generations are more able to accept and use the e-business model, as this is the environment they grow up.

The security concerns also lead to privacy issue. We had heard of contact lists or personal details being hacked and exposed due to poor e-business system security.

Of all the disadvantages listed above, payments, identity, contract and the governing laws are evolving, thus a more matured eco-system is expected in the near future.

It’s clear that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of e-business.

However, as a conclusion, after studying the advantage disadvantages of e business, it still depends on a person’s risk appetite, passion and experience to decide whether to proceed or not with e-business.

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