XML in E-Commerce

What is the value of XML in e-commerce?  Give examples of its usage.

# In the current business world, there is an intense demand of online marketplace. To be successful in this immense competition of business one should have to effectively support and guide to customers in online relationship spectrum and have to appreciate that the intermediate goal of product recognition, web traffic, registered users and online sales which is not as essential as generating customer loyalty. These identified opportunities can be employed by implementing XML technology; will have the most success designing and effective online marketing strategies.

Some of the significant values of XML towards e-commerce are as follows:

•  Promotional awareness: Initially, companies have to catch the attention of marketplace by representing how their products are relevant to potential customers. For that, company can grab lots of benefits by managing promotional information directly in XML. For instance, particular promotional XML documents can be circulated via multiple distribution channels. Using XML allows company to create multiple versions of promotional material to targeting more to the customers by using separate transformations for assorted market segments.
•  Longevity: XML data exists as plain text which gives data long life with potential of readability and reuse of data. So, even if the system becomes obsolete, data will remain there for a long term.
• Business to Business communication: While conducting e-commerce, it involves communication between other companies and often might poses a challenge. XML make the communication easier. For instance, company don’t have to bother to know how the other’s back-end system are organized, by developing the mapping to transform CML document into the internal format used be the back-end systems will keep privacy. Likewise, by following the protocol (the XML vocabulary), the host company don’t have to bother to interact with the system of the new company for an addition of another partner, etc.
• Freedom of Extensibility: XML provides a standard framework to create business-oriented markup vocabularies as it is a meta-language.
• Loyalty: XML can facilitate organizations implement strategies targeted to retain the satisfactory of the customer such as, XML provides companies with a mechanism to improve their online customer support by allowing users to directly access enterprise support information such as technical documentation or operations data. Similarly, it can ensure the delivery of the product, once customers have acquired items online and also it make sure that the services is executed as promised. XML- based web services facilitate to link business partners together in order to provide the high quality service that encourages repeat purchases.