E-commerce or E-business enables any merchant or business to transact through the electronic media with its customers or other businesses and even allows access to the corporate or individual customer to its internal information. This requires a lot more planning and implementation than many E-commerce fans have thought of.

An E-commerce strategy, like any majorinitiatives, needs a grand vision and a clear step-by-step plan for success. Let us look at the case of Federal Express (Fedex), one of the most successful examples in this area, to understand the process. This company has encouraged their customers to interact with them electronically for the last 16 years. They have a record of 2.5 million packages delivered everyday to 211 countries with an on-time delivery record of over 99 per cent.

For successful E-commerce, you need a step-by-step approach. Stage 1: Have a Web presence. An attractive and interesting site is the shop window. It must have complete company and product information. And most important, it must motivate the customer to come back and buy! The second step is messaging and publishing. The use of organisation-wide information storage and dissemination mechanisms and extending capabilities like e-mail and information retrieval to the customer happens at this stage. Fedex provides optional e-mail responses to the customer which gives them theability to be continually updated on package movements.

The third step is all about collaboration within the organisation. This is the crucial stage where intra-company business processes are turned towards the customer so that the transition from external transactions through EDI or the internet to the internal workflow is smoothly achieved.Transaction with suppliers and stakeholders takes place at the fourth stage. This is the stage where the benefits of electronic transactions are extended to the suppliers, shareholders and other internal and external stakeholders of the organisation.

The fifth stage -- transactions with customers -- is one of the most exciting stages involving the automation of payment systems, linkage of delivery mechanisms to the specific needs of the customer and providing all kinds of after-sales services.

The potential for E-commerce is truly awesome. Forrester Research predicts that business-to-business transactions will reach a level of over US $ 300 billion. Current researchin the US shows that 56 per cent of all internet users buy on the Net and 67 per cent of the remainder plan to buy on-line in the next six months. But success in E-business is certainly not for the faint-hearted. There has to be a clear vision of the business benefits that are planned, processes throughout the organisation have to be reengineered to make them customer-focussed, the right technologies have to be chosen and put in place and the entire mindset of the organisation has to be focussed on this new way of doing business.

The author is Managing Director, Aptech Limited.