E-Commerece

     

E-COMMERCE

Electronic Commerce or E-Commerce as it is popularly known is a

natural development, which has followed in the footsteps of the

Internet. The Internet is like a shop, which is permanently open, all

24 hours and all 365 days in a year. This makes the Internet the

ideal place to do business in. In this kind of an electronic shop,

there is no requirement of a shopkeeper or a cashier or a security

guard. Further, the shop can be accessed by anybody in any part of

the world. It also does away with the necessity of having an expensive

piece of real estate and furnishing the same. All these attractive

features have made the Internet an immensely popular place to set

up shops. In India, E-commerce is not as widely popular or prevalent as in the western countries. The main reason for this is that at present, it is

not possible to make payments by credit card through the Internet.

Once the credit card companies are in a position to offer the

cardholders some kind of assurance about the security aspect of

making payments via the Internet, the volcano of E-commerce will

erupt with a force that will shake the entire Indian business scenario.

Even today, there are already several outlets that have set up

their own web sites and who accept purchase orders through the

Internet. A popular super market in New Delhi, several cinema halls

in Mumbai, numerous book shops in many cities are some such

examples of businesses which have already started making use of

Internet for commercial purposes. Thus, for example, one can book

tickets of a film running at a particular cinema hall through the

internet and then go to the hall a few minutes before the show,

identify one’s self and get the tickets without having to wait for

hours in a queue. E-commerce throws up several new challenges. The most important issue that is thrown up by such commerce is that of taxation. For taxation purposes, the first question that has to be addressed is where did the sale take place? Since there is no physical form of the place of business in case of E-commerce, it becomes difficult to determine the country/state/city from where the sale was concluded. Accordingly, jurisdictional disputes arise about the taxation of the same especially with respect to indirect taxes. Even the most advanced nations such as U.S.A, Japan, France, and U.K have not yet been able to satisfactorily solve this problem.

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