Techno Page - By Harendra Alwis

E- commerce
Many have asked about the issues that need to be addressed when venturing into e-business. I am sure most of them have been attracted by the huge valuations that web companies get in the stock market, even when they don't make a profit.

If you have actually purchased something on the web, you've had direct personal experience with e-commerce. Still, you may feel like you don't understand e-commerce at all. What is all the hype about? Why the huge valuations? And most importantly, is there a way for you to participate?

If you have an e-commerce idea, how might you get started implementing it? Let's have a look!

Commerce is the exchange of goods and services, usually for money. Even if you go to work each day for a company that produces a product, that is a link in the chain of commerce. When you think about commerce in these different ways, you instinctively recognise several different roles:

Buyers - these are people with money who want to purchase a product or service.

Sellers - these are the people who offer goods and services to buyers.

Sellers are generally recognised in two different forms: retailers who sell directly to consumers and wholesalers or distributors who sell to retailers and other businesses.

Producers - these are the people who create the products and services that sellers offer to buyers. A producer is always, by necessity, a seller as well. The producer sells the products produced to wholesalers, retailers or directly to the consumer.

You can see that at this high level, commerce is a fairly simple concept! Whether it is something as simple as a person making and selling 'kottu' on a street, commerce at its simplest level relies on buyers, sellers and producers.

Actual elements of commerce and commercial transactions get slightly more complicated because you have to deal with the details. If you would like to sell something to a customer, at the very core of the matter, you must have a product or service to offer. You must also have a place from which to sell your products. Here, even a phone number might be the place. If you think about it a bit more, you realise that the place for any traditional mail order company is the combination of an ad or a catalogue and a phone number or a mail box.

You need to figure out a way to get people to come to your place. This is known as marketing. Locating your place in a busy shopping centre is one way to get traffic. Sending out a mail order catalogue is another.

There is also advertising, word of mouth and even the guy in a chicken suit at Union Place who stands by the road waving at passing cars!

You need a way to accept orders and money. Many businesses do not require you to pay for the product or service at the time of delivery, and some products and services are delivered continuously (water, power and phone...). That gets into the whole area of billing and collections.

You need a way to deliver the product or service.

Sometimes customers do not like what they buy, so you need a way to accept returns. You may charge a fee for returns, and you may require the customer to get authorisation before returning anything. Sometimes a product breaks, so you need a way to honour warranty claims.

Many products today require customer service and technical support departments to help customers use them. Computers are a good example of this sort of product. On-going products like cell phone service may also require on-going customer service because customers want to change the service they receive over time.

In an e-commerce sales channel, you find all of these elements as well, but they change slightly. You must have the following elements to conduct e-commerce:

A product
A place to sell the product - in the e-commerce case, a web site displays the products in some way and acts as the place.
A way to get people to come to your web site
A way to accept orders - normally an on-line form of some sort
A way to accept money - normally a merchant account handling credit card payments. This piece requires a secure ordering page and a connection to a bank. Or you may use more traditional billing techniques either on-line or through the mail.
A fulfilment facility to ship products to customers worldwide. In the case of software and information, however, fulfilment can occur over the Web through a file download mechanism.
A way to accept returns
A way to handle warrantee claims if necessary
A way to provide customer service (often through email, on-line forms, on-line knowledge bases and FAQs, etc.)
In addition, there is often a strong desire to integrate other business functions or practices into the e-commerce offering. A simple example being the ability to show the customer the exact status of an order.

Re- mixes
I am a keen reader of your page. I have learnt so much from your page and I have also found a lot of mp3 songs because of you. I love the re-mixes some DJs do. The way they have mixed them is so cool. I too would like to do the same, but the problem is that I don't know what kind of software they use. I use cool edit, fruity loops, acid dj and mix moister but with those software you can't do that kind of re-mixes.

Please tell me the software that you need to do such remixes and where to find them.

Dinuka Arseculeratne

I have not tried out most of this software myself, but I am confident that you will find that at least some of them will serve your purpose.

AtomixMP3 - sells automated mix software, providing one-click beat matching, live recording, and master tempo.

DJ Manager - Request management and music database software for disc jockeys.
DJ Pro Software - provides Windows software for DJ and KJ businesses to maintain clients, manage events, and generate contracts.

FinalScratch - offers a turntable based software and hardware system that allows a dj to control digital files by hand and vinyl.

MixMeister - offers tools to design DJ mixes for parties, events, web casts, and CD recordables.

Music Database 2000 - DJ music database software.

OnCue Audio Mixing System - offers multi-track editing software for disc jockeying and mixing MP3 music onto CDs or mini discs.

Tornado - offers live and automatic output of multi track radio programmes.
Traktor - series of software mixing tools for Mac and PC.

Visiosonic - mix, rip and encode MP3 files and view videos for different Windows formats.

Yowstar - developers of YOW*, a digital mixing application for the MacOS.
Good luck

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