Trust and traceability in electronic commerce

Ⅵ Electronic commerce (EC) will modify some of the traditional models for the conduct of business. However, it is important that many of the long-standing elements of commerce be replicated in the electronic world. Commerce, electronic or otherwise, requires several elements: trading partners, goods and services, units of exchange (money), transaction infrastructures, and delivery and distribution mechanisms. These elements have been developed over centuries of legal, governmental, technological, and commercial practices and have resulted in a business infrastructure that people understand and trust. We explore two important elements of that infrastructure, trust and traceability, in the context of the evolving EC infrastructure. We look at a number of trust enhancers, i.e., technology or other processes that can help increase the level of confidence that people have in electronic commerce. We also examine the concept of traceability, an important trust enhancer, in detail. Finally, we discuss some specific technologies that can increase the overall level of trust in electronic commerce. ommercial practice and common law, developed over several thousand years, provide the context into which electronic commerce must fit, if it is to succeed. Early commerce, one step above the simplest trading of two articles between two people, was conducted face-to-face, possibly in front of a witness for the more complex transactions. The advent of reliable mail service in the eighteenth century, the telegraph in the nineteenth century, and the spread of telephones in the twentieth allowed commerce to be conducted on a remote basis. Computer-based commerce via networks such as the Internet is simply one more step in that evolution. Prior to the era of remote transactions, money was basically precious metal. The Pound Sterling was exactly that. Because transporting large amounts of precious metal in the service of remote trading was both labor intensive and hazardous, improvements to the banking system were needed to permit keeping of accounts and issuing letters of credit, drafts, checks, and vouchers of various kinds. Money, over the last century, has become disconnected from any underlying metal, and is essentially based on trust in the stability of the issuing country. In recent times financial accounts have been kept almost exclusively on computer based systems. Despite pressures for rapid development of electronic methods of conducting traditional business activities , the underlying structures, relationships, conventions , and methods of traditional methods will remain the dominant way of doing business. Electronic methods must be developed to coexist …