Identify the eight unique features of e-commerce technology and explain how these features set e-commerce apart from more traditional ways of conducting commercial transactions

What will be an ideal response?

The eight unique features of e-commerce technology are ubiquity, global reach, universal standards, richness, interactivity, information density, personalization/customization, and social technology. The fact that e-commerce is available nearly everywhere, at any time, (ubiquity) extends the marketplace beyond traditional boundaries and removes it from a temporal and geographic location. A marketspace is created in which shopping can take place anywhere, enhancing consumer convenience and reducing shopping costs, whereas in traditional commerce the marketplace is a physical place you must visit in order to transact. The global reach of e-commerce means that commerce is enabled across national and cultural boundaries as never before, with potentially billions of consumers and millions of businesses worldwide included in the marketspace.

Traditional commerce, by contrast, is local or regional involving local merchants or national merchants with local outlets. Universal standards (one set of technical media standards) also allow for the seamless enablement of global commerce. In contrast, most traditional commerce technologies differ from one nation to the next. In traditional markets, national sales forces and small retail stores can provide a complex and content-rich message. However, there is generally a trade-off between the richness of the message and the number of consumers who can be reached with the marketing message. In e-commerce, the trade-off is no longer necessary. An information rich environment is extended globally. Unlike any other commercial technology of the twentieth century, except perhaps the telephone, e-commerce technologies are interactive, allowing for two-way communication between the seller and the consumer. E-commerce technologies reduce information collection, storage, processing, and communication costs, thereby greatly increasing the prevalence, accuracy, and timeliness of information. This information density (information that is more plentiful, cheaper, and of higher quality) sets e-commerce apart from all other traditional methods of conducting transactions. E-commerce technologies also permit the personalization and customization of marketing messages on a level that was impossible with previous commerce technologies. Marketing messages can be targeted to specific individuals based on their interests and past purchasing behavior, and the product or service can be altered to suit a customer's preferences and prior behavior. Social technology allows users to easily generate and share content and permits a many-to-many model of mass communications that is different from previous technologies. This supports the creation of new business models and products that support social network services.