Introduction
E-commerce involves trading through the Internet. This is as a result of great familiarity in the Internet use all over the world. The Internet is being used greatly in the market, a thing that has contributed to growth in the world economies. The Internet is being used as a tool in advertising products and services in the market. It is also used by sellers as a channel of providing information to the consumers on their products and services.
This ensures that the buyers are well informed about the products before they make decisions to buy them. The power of servers providing e-commerce has been increasing but these sites have not been able to improve the services provided to the users. This has been leading to loss of revenue due to slow connectivity and thus effort should be put in order to perfect these sites (Floyd, 1986).
E-commerce Sites
In 2000, e-commerce generated $132 billion more than twice the money generated in 1999. With this it is clear that e-commerce is generating enough revenue (Glushko et al, 2001). Thus, it is important that the availability and performance of the e-commerce sites be improved and their performance monitored closely to ensure their efficiency. There are two types of e-commerce sites, those are, business to business and business to consumers.
Business to business provides services to corporations while business to consumers provide services to individuals. The main difference between these two sites is the user population. The business to business site is usually restricted to corporations for security purpose while business to consumers usually has high population of users. The configuration of the general server is similar in both sites (Kant, 1992).
Agreements of the services between corporations and individuals must be honored in order to retain and gain customers. Performance and availability of the servers are two important things that must be checked for effective e-commerce.
E-commerce environment server consists of two parts, those are, front end and back end network. Front end consists of web and application services accessible by the users over Internet while back end consists of security fire walls and the data base servers (Glushko et al, 2001).
Managerial Implications
Work load implication of e-commerce servers affects its performance for it is usually high. Server overload affects the performance and availability of e-commerce services and in return it reduces the income that would have been gained. E-commerce traffic greatly affects the usage of Internet for business and thus it is important that the ways of controlling this traffic be put in place (Kant, 1992).
Load balancing is a common method that is being used to improve the performance of e-commerce servers. Understanding the workload of these servers is significant in efforts to eliminate traffic in e-commerce. Understanding of the work load in a typical e-commerce server is important in order to be able to develop schemes of eliminating traffic (Glushko et al, 2001).
Another managerial implication is performance implication. This is usually as a result of web traffic, which leads to on/off processes. The response rate is very slow in e-commerce.
The response times in e-commerce is believed to be heavy-tailed in nature though the response files are always of the same size. This is due to inclusion of images and video files in the overall traffic. In e-commerce, response time is dependent on processing and transfer time (Floyd, 1986).
Reference List
Floyd, A. (1986). Short-Term File Reference Patterns in a UNIX Environment. Technical Report, Computer Science Department, University of Rochester.
Glushko et al, (2001). An XML Framework for Agent-Based E-Commerce. Communications of ACM. New York: Prentice Hall
Kant, K. (1992). Introduction to Computer System Performance Evaluation. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.