E commerce
... So far e-commerce has been mainly active among the OECD countries headed by the United States. ... E-commerce in those countries have expanded so quickly it is expected that in the year 2003 it will account to anything between 10 to 25 per cent of world trade, thus becoming a major component in cross border flows . This only indicates the importance of e-commerce in conducting efficient and less costly trade, where transactions costs are diminished immensely. E-commerce however, ranks at the top of the hierarchy of web applications in terms of complexity, impact and future implications . Yet, e-commerce is associated with a number of problems, including security on the Internet where E-Commerce is still subject to fraud, human misconduct and theft, and application performance, which is most important when using multimedia catalogs and product displays. Bandwidth requirements in e-commerce should be adequate enough to support transactions which start with display of products and ends with delivery. Large businesses practicing e-commerce do not usually have this problem but small and medium businesses and consumers cannot afford to possess the necessary bandwidth to support heavy traffic.