Air Asia E-Commerce

1.0 Introduction

Electronic Commerce (EC) is the process of buying, selling, transferring, or trading products, services, or even data using a network, mostly the Internet and intranets. EC is defined from these perspectives based on communications, business process, service, online, collaborations and community. There are three types of different concepts in pure versus partial Electronic Commerce organization which are brick-and-mortar organizations, pure online (virtual) organizations and click-and-mortar organizations. Virtual e-tailers are firms that sell products and services directly to consumers using the Internet without the need to maintain concrete sales channels. Virtual e-tailers have the advantages of low overhead costs and streamlined processes. However, the disadvantage is a single drawback could cause a lack of established infrastructure which includes logistics to support the online activities. Besides that, some specialized businesses would find it hard to keep their business running because they would not have enough customers and stock.

The company that was chosen is Air Asia Sdn. Bhd. This company was chosen because it is a click-and-mortar company as it uses the Internet to run transactions as well as having physical outlets to allow their customers to purchase tickets there (Only4fact, 2009).

2.0 Background of the company

2.1 How it all started.

Air Asia started their business in 1996. The organization provides fares comparatively lower than Malaysia Airlines (MAS), which resulted to losses during its early years of operations as they failed to get the market's attention or attract enough customers over from MAS (Cyberessays, 2011). Three days before the World Trade Centre in the United States on 11th September 2001 attacked by the terrorist, the founder of Air Asia Dato’ Sri Dr. Tony Fernandes and Connor McCarthy with three other Malaysia invertors faced a debt of RM1 (26cents per share) that assuming RM40million (US $10.5...