If you are planning a trip overseas, whether for business or pleasure then you will probably need a visa especially if you intend to stay for an extended period. Sometime in the past when you required a visa, you had to visit the consulate or the embassy.

That visit would need weeks of applying, planning, and a lot of documentation. You did all this, and there was no guarantee that you would get the visa. But in recent times more countries are adopting electronic visas. There more than twenty four countries that use electronic visa travel authorization to give access their country, Australia have visa waiver program for some countries.