Competition is heating up between banks and brokerages for market share in the online personal financial services space, but technical troubles still plague many firms. Success could be the death of e-commerce. Though this sounds rather ominous, it is becoming increasingly obvious that lack of foresight, coupled with long-term planning, may result in an e-commerce site crippling a company's business. In the race to get online, many organizations have not considered how they will cope with “the millions of visitors a popular e-commerce site might attract”. (Web 1)
Some organizations that have already transferred their core businesses online have become victims of their own, unforeseen, success. In addition to losing potential online customers, there is a danger that traditional customers will go elsewhere if they have access problems with a site. After all, how many times have you visited a slow or unresponsive Web site and moved to a competitor because you were frustrated? How often have you also questioned this same company's abilities in other areas? If this happens often enough on the most popular sites, consumers could lose faith in e-commerce.
Successful firms will be the ones that adopt a multi-phased approach that defines their overall business strategy prior to the commencement of any work. Armed with an agreed-upon strategy, a plan can be developed to build, develop, integrate and deploy the site. This approach involves planning for future demand, ensuring the IT infrastructure is easily and highly scalable and usable, and integrating e-commerce operations into corporate systems.
Some of the pitfalls are: Product range, Ease of use, Speed of use, Customer trust level, Quality of service. The success of an e-commerce site depends on more than its ability to attract hits. Without a robust infrastructure underpinning an electronic trading system, e-commerce will fail. Supporting an e-commerce site.....
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