Virtual businesses use electronic means to transact business compared to traditional brick and mortar businesses that rely on face-to-face transactions with physical documents and physical or credit currencies.
Video Virtual business
Histori
Amazon.com is a virtual business pioneer. As an online bookstore, this store sends and pioneers bookstore services in the absence of a physical retail store; efficiently connect buyers and sellers without the overhead of a brick-and-mortar location. Because Web 2.0 services have increased in popularity, many businesses have begun using this communicative and collaborative technology to reach their customers. With high security, PCI DSS compliance regulations, and more stringent monitoring capabilities, credit card transactions over the Internet are even more secure than other options such as phone or fax. Along with connecting customers with physical products, virtual businesses are beginning to provide essential services as well. Recently, online delivery of professional services such as administration, design, and marketing services has increased in popularity. Such companies have refined their offerings to include services such as Virtual Assistants, where the person providing the service works in his or her own office and provides services over the Internet or other technologies.
Maps Virtual business
The physical/virtual mix
Most brick and mortar companies reduce costs and increase market share by engaging in e-commerce through websites and by leveraging existing telecommunication infrastructure. In addition to sales and customer relationships, such e-commerce may also include:
- Collaborate with suppliers and competitors.
- Toggle many business functions like marketing, operations management, and new product development,
- Telecommuting
Virtual world
Some virtual businesses operate only in cyberspace. Environments like Second Life have decent enough economic activity to trade and one can earn a living from the sale of virtual properties, products and services to virtual customers in this virtual world.
Virtual companies
In the United States a group of people can gather online and enter into an agreement to work together toward a nonprofit goal, with or without having to formally merge or form a traditional company. A virtual company (S-corp or LLC) may be required to keep registered agents with physical addresses but can be started, operated, and terminated without any heads ever in their physical existence. Global Healthcare Marketing and Communications, LLC (Global HMC) is an example of a virtual company that operates worldwide through bricks or mortar. The company provides medical education services for large pharmaceutical companies and its business model differs significantly from traditional medical institutions with physical presence.
Virtual company
A virtual company is an independent corporate network - suppliers, customers, competitors, connected by information technology to share skills, costs, and access to each other's markets. Such organizations are usually formed on the basis of cooperative agreements with little or no hierarchy or vertical integration. This flexible structure minimizes the impact of agreement on individual participating organizations and facilitates the addition of new participants with new skills and resources. Such arrangements are usually temporary and dissolved once a common goal is reached. Virtual companies are rarely linked to independent legal firms or their own brick and mortar identities.
See also
- Virtual practice community
- Virtual management
- Distributed developments
- Virtual team
- Virtual volunteering
- Virtual Office
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia