Once you have completed a brief subscription form, you will be redirected to this article. In order to succeed, e-businesses must avoid losing their customers to new marketplaces and attract repeat business. To accomplish this, e-businesses must provide good reasons for their customers to stay, satisfying expectations by enabling transactions to be completed online, delivering flawless execution and synchronizing the information stream between all participants. Today's trading communities interact through incompatible or disconnected infrastructures that result in an unsatisfactory experience for both buyers and sellers, who must deal with dropped orders, unprocessed returns, and little or no tracking. Transactions are not executed effectively, requiring too much manual intervention or involved setup and reconfiguration of infrastructure workflows.
Processes are redundant or disjointed, and the cost of operation is high.
To some extent, these challenges are to be expected. The e-commerce industry is still young and in spite of its phenomenal growth, or perhaps because of it, it has a fair share of growing pains. Much of the problem stems from the pressure on an e-business to establish a market presence as soon as possible. This rush to market has forced many companies to focus on establishing their brands, storefronts and customer base first, leaving other considerations, such as how to manage the rest of the transaction lifecycle effectively, for later. The race to create competitive advantage has led firms to make tactical technology decisions for quick functional hits, resulting in a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies.