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Such transactions fee payment gateway would be conducted at a lower cost.

Author: Kabir Khan
by Kabir Khan
Posted: Feb 18, 2015

We can think of e-business and ICT investment as an iceberg—with a visible part that is measured by the statisticians or the accountants, but a hidden part under water consisting of 'intangible' activities which nevertheless improve productivity. These will include: reorganizing and reinventing business practices, such as outsourcing, and both formal and informal training. Indeed, we can think about online payment solution the intangible knowledge derived from e-business technologies being one of the new factors of production for some organizations.

Most commentators tend to assume that the impact of investment in e-business technologies takes place instantly at the point of production or use. But the benefits (as well as some of the hidden costs) may actually be arriving years after the money has been spent. Indeed, there may be a negative, downward, effect on efficiency in the period immediately following investment. In some cases, it may be two to three years before productivity improvements are seen and there may be a 'long and variable lag of between 5 and 15 years' before real changes in output can be identified and this time lag may be different in different countries.

E-business technologies can also affect different kinds of organization in unexpected ways. We might expect that levels of capital investment and economic rewards would be linked to firm size: that is, the larger the firm, the larger the investment and the larger the benefit. We might also expect, other things being equal, for manufacturing firms to be able to benefit more from capital investment in production technologies than those in other sectors, since they can use e-business technologies to optimize both value chains and operational processes. Short case 2.1 provides an example of the chemicals, rubber, and plastics industry.

One of the leading economic principles associated with the growth of the Internet, which has profound implications for firms, is that of disintermediation. In conventional markets, intermediaries smooth the flow of transactions between buyers and sellers. Such intermediaries include wholesalers, retailers, travel agents, and brokers. They play and have played an important role in serving the markets on whose behalf they buy. Intermediaries save the end customer or consumer having to search for, compare, co-ordinate, and source products and services from a myriad of potential suppliers. Disintermediation, it has been argued, is a direct consequence of the Internet's capabilities to make a wide range of information efficiently available to the end user. Commentators proposed in the late 1990s that we would book our holidays directly with hotels, buy electrical goods directly from suppliers, and purchase industrial goods by cutting out the middleman. Such transactions fee payment gateway would be conducted at a lower cost.

However, many markets created under the auspices of e-business will still have intermediation needs of their own, at least at present. As early as 1997, economists Joseph Bailey and Yannis Bakos proposed that there were four particular features of intermediation which might still be as relevant in online markets as offline, and which could be provided by new incumbents or by existing firms. These are:

Aggregation: although searching for suppliers becomes easier online, a great many more possible sources of supply are revealed. There may therefore still be opportunities for intermediaries who aggregate or re-package content—particularly digital content—to prosper. For example, news-gathering portals like Google News have been very successful in making sense of the vast increase in accessibility of individual news stories on particular topics.

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Author: Kabir Khan

Kabir Khan

Member since: Jul 16, 2014
Published articles: 46

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