Most of the respondents felt that e-commerce was crucial to their business strategy and have an annual information technology spending ranging from Rs 100,000 to more than Rs 100 million.

Electronic commerce is a group of technologies used by companies to communicate with customers or other companies to carry out information gathering or business transactions and Internet is the most common of these tools.

According to the survey, most of these transactions were done through order taking, marketing and communication on the Internet with monetary transactions such as payments and receipts being given the lowest rating.

There are a whole lot of regulatory issues to be tackledon the payment front, head of business development, Darshan Bijur said adding that Indian companies cannot pay through the credit card as they are always required to back their order or payment with a signature. Also, the infrastructure is not adequately equipped to carry out such transactions, he said.

About 47 per cent of the respondents mainly use the Internet for news and information and only one and two per cent use it for payment and receipts respectively. About 63 per cent of the respondents using e-commerce were from the manufacturing and distribution sectors with about 10 per cent being from computers and communication sector, the survey said.

About 58 per cent of the respondents had global reach and about half of them were targeting both other businesses and the end-consumers.

Improved customer service (83 %) and productivity (78 %) were rated very high as top two potential benefits e-commerce might provide to the organisations surveyed. Lack of standard payment infrastructure and tradingpartner's technology were billed as the top two potential barriers to the effective adoption of e-commerce in their organisations, the survey said.

Infrastructure cost and security issues were also seen as major issues by the organisations. About 40 per cent of the organisations are taking measures to integrate e-commerce technologies with their current operating processes and technologies, the survey said.

Most of the respondents rated network access controls and through-the-system-tests and audits the highest for the most critical issues for establishing security of e-commerce, the survey said.