Businesses with less than 20 employees are regarded as small businesses. The four main types of small business structures are mostly Sole Trader, Partnership, Trust, and Company. E-commerce is the transformation of key commerce processes through the use of the Internet. E-commerce consists of the buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products and services over the Internet. The benefits of E-commerce are reduction in costs, convenient communication and performance of the business process. Several models for E-commerce are Business to Business (B2B),Business to Customer (B2C),Business to Employee (B2E),Business to Government (B2G),and Customer to Customer (C2C). This thesis considers the small typical business structures in Australia to build a framework for small business. Small Business Framework (SBF) is developed to provide a framework to design and implement Web applications for Smart Clients and applications for E-commerce and M-commerce models which are mainly B2B and B2C. The SBF's components are database, email, electronic payment, products, orders, and login. The technology requirements to operate the SBF are Personal Digital Assistants (PDA),Unicode, Web Server, Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VS .NET) and provision of services through Internet. In order to test and evaluate SBF, an Online Asian Grocery Mobile (OAGM) application has been developed for B2C using MS Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VS.NET). Results showed that the SBF is a good framework for small businesses and the OAGM is a successful application prototype since OAGM provides good accessibility, saves time, and is effective.
Smart clients for small e-business framework
Nguyen, P. (Author). 2005
Student thesis: Master's Thesis