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From the Book: PREFACE: PrefaceIntroduction Almost 40 percent of the cost of selling online takes place after the customer presses the Buy button. At that moment-when the visitor has just become a customer-the most crucial part of the relationship just begins. Payment processing, order fulfillment, product delivery, and product returns handling are the largest gaps in electronic commerce today. These important but unglamorous, messy, and often expensive functions are not optional in true e-business. They can make or break your customer relationships, profitability, and future business. Identifying and managing these functions, termed e-commerce logistics and e-fulfillment, is the subject of this book. Until now, most merchants thought electronic commerce was achieved by hooking an online catalog to one of the many electronic shopping cart packages, then waiting for orders to be emailed to them. Not one key electronic commerce vendor mentions that the real work for the merchant actually starts when the order is received. This book demystifies a process that is sure to be new for most B2B and B2C online merchants today. Here are other features that distinguish this book. Forrester Research says that half of all business will be online by 2002. Business-to-business e-commerce will grow to $1.3 trillion by 2003, from $43 billion in 1998-yet until now there hasn't been a single book that addresses the unique challenges of e-logistics and e-fulfillment in the context of electronic commerce. This is the first book to do so. This book provides practical, proven techniques to assure your customers receive the products that they orderfromyour Internet site in a timely, efficient, traceable way. You also find out the ins and outs of reverse logistics (handling product returns)or how to outsource these functions cost-effectively. Useful tools such as planning templates, checklists, and spreadsheets are included throughout the book and on a Web site. Audience This book is aimed at technically savvy executives, information technology professionals, and other enterprise leaders who are faced with the challenge of delivering the goods their organizations sell online. Whether the reader is an electronic commerce or logistics practitioner or provider, this book will be an extremely useful addition to the How To books of his or her library. The Organization of This Book The first three chapters of the book describe the issues and tasks surrounding setting up and costing an electronic commerce infrastructure to handle e-logistics and fulfillment. Important FTC rules and regulations, defining your business processes, and calculating potential return on investment are among the many topics discussed. An infrastructure planning template and an ROI calculation spreadsheet are provided to give you a running start. Chapters 4 through 7 tackle the challenges that take place after the Buy button is clicked. The topics of order processing, taxes, online fraud, order fulfillment, shipping, and customer service are presented and a number of checklists are provided, including a useful chart to help you determine what is taxable. Chapters 8 through 10 cover the convergence of e-commerce and logistics on a global scale, including taxation of international e-commerce transactions, emerging data exchange standards, and reverse logistics-a field unto itself. The final two chapters of the book wrap things up by addressing whether or not to outsource the entire e-commerce logistics and e-fulfillment processes, and offers two user perspectives by pioneers in the field. Contact Information Although I have frequent opportunities to teach and speak throughout the world, I'm not an academician or researcherI'm out in the trenches full-time, just as you are. I always appreciate your real-world suggestions, comments, and other feedback to continue to improve the book's usefulness. You can reach me by email at deborah@bayles.com, or stop by the Web site I've set up, ...
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