A manufacturer or online merchant must be able o customize an individual order and ship it directly to the buyer anywhere in the world. It's also necessary to track the location of the item at any given time along the supply chain with handling customer inquiries, product return, and even offering gift wrapping "all at ten times the speed and at fraction of the cost of traditional shipping and fulfillment. Forrester Research sums up the vastly differing characteristics between commerce site logistics and traditional logistics. For example, whether for traditional logistics the average order amount is more than 1,000 items, it is less than 100 with commerce site logistics. The demand style and inventory/order flow in the first case is push and unidirectional, whereas with e-commerce logistics it is pull and bi-directional. Destinations for traditional logistics are concentrated with the stable consistent demand, whereas for e-commerce logistics destinations are highly dispersed with seasonal, fragmented demand. All these fundamental differences in traditional logistics versus commerce site logistics are representing a shift to future of e-logistics. Opportunities are arising along to better service customer, whether it is another business or a consumer. E-commerce is a narrow term applied to the process of conducting simple transactions on-line. Electronic business, however, is the total integration of electronic processes throughout the critical functions of an enterprise. It is a total solution that takes into account e-logistics, e-fulfillment, supply chain optimization, enhanced customer satisfaction, and a combination of other tangible and intangible benefits. Designing, building and maintaining an e-business site involves both hard costs and soft costs. Which are usually allocated in three ways: infrastructure costs, direct project costs, and distributed costs. Hard costs include tangible good such as hardware, wiring, software, telecommunications lines, and the like.
