E-Commerce? Where Do You Think

¶ … e-Commerce? Where do you think the field of e-Commerce is today and where might it be tomorrow? Please give some possible examples in your response.

Today e-commerce is closer than ever before to fulfilling its ambitious potential as an integral part of any company's core business. The levels of integration now possible between the many web-based applications that can even be found on cell phones, PDAs, and other hand-held devices underscore the point that e-commerce is now pervasive. The ability of manufacturers for example to place orders for highly customized products, including heavy-duty trucks, earth-moving equipment in the case of John Deere, and the highly complex configurations of Cisco routers, hubs, and switches all illustrate the complexity of product definition and transactions that e-commerce systems can now reliably handle today.

This is made possible by a combination of factors that are strengthening e-commerce today and leading to strong growth in the future. First there is the more sophisticated levels of integration between e-commerce systems, and the back-office pricing, ERP, service, and support systems as well. Second, the use of pricing exceptions to capture incremental business through the use of automated processes throughout a company's distribution channels have paid off with higher ROIs than any company previously experienced. Third, there is the fact that catalogs and guided selling systems, or those applications used for navigating through product selections are making major strides in performance. Taken together, all these factors are contributing to continual rapid growth of e-commerce globally.

Question 2 (Essay

What are the roles and responsibilities of an e-Commerce Manager? If you were hiring an e-Commerce Manager tomorrow, what would you require of this person in terms of education, experience and skills?

The role of the e-Commerce Manager in strategic sense is to attract, sell, and serve both prospects and customers. Starting with the task of attracting customers, the e-Commerce Manager must know how to coordinate the many web-based applications used for transforming web site visitor's clicks into sales leads, and then into potential customers. This makes it critical for the e-Commerce Manager to understand how sales funnels work, specifically how to open up the top of the sales funnel and progress prospects through them. Secondly, the e-Commerce Manager needs to know how to create sales through the use of catalogs, guided selling, product and sales configuration, and also through the intelligent use of pricing. This is the most difficult part of an e-Commerce Manager's job; the translating of interest on the part of prospects to customers. Finally, the e-Commerce Manager needs to understand how to use online tools for better service to customers.