E-Commerce

 

Infrastructure structure of E-Commerce

There are many hosting companies working in India but most of them are not suitable for eCommerce hosting purpose, because they are providing much less secure and threat protected shared hosting. eCommerce demand highly secure, stable and protected hosting. Trends are changing with some of eCommerce companies starting to offer Saar for hosting web stores with minimal one time costs.
India has got its own version of Cyber Monday known as Great Online Shopping Festival which started in December 2012, when Google India partnered with e-commerce companies including Flip-kart, HomeShop18, Snap deal, India times shopping and Make my trip. "Cyber Monday" is a term coined in the USA for the Monday coming after Black Friday, which is the Friday after Thanks giving Day. Most recent GOSF Great Online Shopping Festival was held during Dec 10 to 12, 2014.
In early June 2013, Amazon.com launched their Amazon India marketplace without any marketing campaigns. In July 2014, Amazon had said it will invest $2 billion (Rs 12,000 crore) in India to expand business, after its largest Indian rival Flipkart announced $1 billion in funding. In June 2016, Amazon agreed to invest another $3 billion to further pressure rivals Flipkart & Snapdeal Amazon has also entered grocery segment with its Kirana now in bangalore and is also planning to enter in various other cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai and faces stiff competition with Indian startups. A large proportion of traffic towards e-commerce sites is driven by coupon sites. In July 2014, CouponChaska.com, a coupon and offers site partnered with some of the largest Indian e-commerce sites including Amazon and Flipkart. It provides a listing of deals from various Indian online stores for free. Alternatively, the site offers mobile recharges to users on each purchase.The  types of the E-commerce that is to be given as below;

On-premises e-commerce

On-premises e-commerce software usually requires initial one time purchase investment in terms of licensing fees. Also, it implies extra costs related to hardware and installation services as well as data migration and on-going maintenance fees that are usually charged on a yearly basis for software updates and support. Some examples of typical on premises E-commerce platforms are Oracle Web Commerce (formerly ATG) Hybris (company),^[1] Intershop Communications,^[2] Sana Commerce.,^[3] and IBM WebSphere.^[4]
Advantages:

1. Easily customizable;
2. Data security;
3. High performance;

Disadvantages:

1. Large initial investment;
2. Self-maintenance;
3. Technical knowledge

Software as a service (SaaS) E-commerce

Software as a Service (SaaS)- is a cloud based delivery model in which applications are hosted and managed in a service provider's datacenter, paid for on a subscription basis and accessed via a browser over an internet connection. Two examples of typical SaaS E-commerce solutions are Shopify^[5] and Demandware.^[6]
Advantages:

1. Affordable low-cost solution;
2. Hosted/upgraded by E-commerce provider;
3. Easily scalable
4. High availability

Disadvantages:

1. Limited integration with back-end systems;
2. Limited control over the system;

Fully Managed (FM) E-commerce

Fully Managed (FM) E-commerce - is the next step of Platform as a Service (PaaS). As a basis, PaaS consists of e-commerce software and hardware hosting. In addition to this, fully managed e-commerce solutions provide services like product picture taking, image editing, data management, customer support, marketing consulting.^[7] FM E-Commerce is offered to brick-and-mortar stores as a B2B solution to help them start selling online quickly and at low cost. The licensing model is usually based on the sales volume.

Open source E-commerce

Open source e-Commerce is a free of charge platform that doesn’t imply licenses fee. Furthermore, open source users are also responsible for installing, maintaining, securing and configuring the software on their own servers. In order to set up an open source platform, basic technical expertise is required in the areas of web design and development. Software products that are distributed as open source are generally free, and users can access and modify the source code.
Advantages:

1. Free of charge system;
2. Wide variety of available addons/plugins/extensions;
3. Better flexibility with a customizable source code;

Disadvantages:

1. More technical knowledge required;
2. Performance depends on hosting costs
3. No standard integration with back-end system;