Some Limitations of E-Commerce
E-commerce is the most efficient method of making online transactions. Be it stock trade, buying and selling or exchanging vital information, the e-commerce tool saves cost and time.
E-commerce is the most efficient method of making online transactions. Be it stock trade, buying and selling or exchanging vital information, the e-commerce tool saves cost and time.E-commerce is the most efficient method of making online transactions. Be it stock trade, buying and selling or exchanging vital information, the e-commerce tool saves cost and time. While the benefits are many, people are also concerned over the limitations of e-commerce solutions. It is true that shopping online has been made easy today. One doesn’t need to go all the way to the market to purchase clothes and dresses, electronic accessories, groceries or even sports goods and many other products associated with online marketing. These transactions of goods, making online payments and making money transfers from one account to another raises a lot of concerns of safety standards.
The main reason is that an expert hacker can easily track account transactions and steal credit card codes or even ATM pin numbers. Some sites which offer genuine services act as scam. So, the first and basic limitation of e-commerce is technical limitation. There is a lack of security in this system along with reliability. The standards of security cannot be completely trusted and the communication protocol is also according to some a little bit not up to the mark.
There is insufficient telecommunication bandwidth. This is mostly needed for B2C clients where large number of business transactions needs to take place and the lack of bandwidth usually slows down the complete process of work. Major tasks suffer backlog when huge amount of information is not able to pass through minimum bandwidth and this also extends the time of work.
The next limitation is that software tools are constantly evolving. This means you need to keep on making constant changes to your website and e-business modules. You may also have to bring new improvisations and business presentations to keep track of time. Nature of online advertisement banners may have to be evolved according to the new changes in web browsers and graphics and animations. Digital and non-digital sales and production information needs to be integrated and this doesn’t become easy when using the e-commerce medium.
The different internet mediums like cable, dialup, ISDN and wireless have their own access limitations. They don’t always work efficiently and they have their own bandwidth restrictions. Different internet providers come up with different package plans which sometimes work to the disadvantage of the consumer and retailer. There are high-speed internet service providers but these are only affordable by the rich in most countries which means a low-scale business operator or consumer will have to compromise with lesser speed for access of any information or transaction.
Some of the browsers don’t display advertisements as they don’t have special standards of software. This means vendors will not be able to reach out to the global audience in a uniform manner.
There is great amount of difficulty in integrating the infrastructure of e-commerce with IT systems currently. Apart from this, there are many other non-technical limitations as we will look into them. As mentioned earlier, most consumers don’t feel secure about the online transaction of money. The trust factor is very low when coming to the faceless seller whom they have never met before. There is always an element of risk that customer information can be misused. There are too many websites which give out personal details of e-mail records and other contact information.
There are conflicting laws between different countries and differences of languages pose a huge problem. The difference of cultures also does not make the understanding easy across borders. There are many concerns raised over these issues by both businessmen and consumers. Apart from all of these limitations, there is a resistance from people to change and trust the internet medium of transaction.
