ASSIGNMENT 1

(CHAPTER 1, 2, 3 and 4)

1. Search the Web for an example of each of the five major types of e-commerce described in Section 1.1. Create an electronic slide presentation or written report describing each Web site (take a screenshot of each) and explain why it fits into one of the five types of e-commerce.

The five major types of e-commerce are as follows: B2C - Business to Customer B2B - Business to Business C2C - Customer to Customer P2P - Per to Peer M-commerce - Mobile Commerce

Business to Customer: AmazonThis is the most common form of e-commerce where online businesses attempt to reach their customers. Amazon is the best example for B2C type of e-commerce.

Amazon.com is an active median that links merchants to buyers using the World Wide Web. To use Amazon.com persons or entities must create an online profile identifying them as registered users of the site. To individual sellers, Amazon.com charges a fee of $0.99 per sale in addition to a referral charge, which is a percentage of the price of the item or items being sold. There is an additional closing fee for media such as books or software ranging from $0.80 to $1.35.

Business to Business: Dell

Business-to-business (B2B) describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer. Dell is a good example for a B2B business transaction.

PremierConnect is Dell’s B2B e-Commerce solution. PremierConnect integrates your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)/procurement system with Dell, helping you speed procurement, lower costs, maximize accuracy, and streamline processes. By all accounts, PremierConnect is your most efficient ordering method — providing both your products and your pricing.

Customer to Customer: EBayConsumer-to-consumer (C2C) (or citizen-to-citizen) electronic commerce involves the electronically facilitated transactions between consumers through some third party. The sites are only intermediaries, just there to match consumers. They do not have to check quality of the products being offered. EBay is a world renowned C2C example for e-Commerce

EBay is the leading global brand for online auctions. The company is a giant marketplace used by more than 100 million people to buy and sell all manner of things to each other. The strong customer relationships are founded on a Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) business model, where strong interrelationships occurs, for example where buyers and sellers leave feedback for each other, and whereby awards are given to the most genuine of eBayers.

Peer to Peer: Microsoft SharePoint Groove WorkspaceBroadly speaking, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology employs a network to put individuals in direct contact with each other in some form. A simple telephone call to a friend, then, could be considered a form of P2P. In contemporary parlance, however, P2P refers almost exclusively to computer-based systems of sharing information directly with others via the Internet. Peer-to-peer technology has its roots in locally-based hardware arrangements in which each individual system shares certain identical features and capabilities. In the Internet Age, however, P2P refers usually to specific applications rather than hardware arrangements.

SharePoint workspace Issues Groove's core concept is the shared workspace, which consists of a set of files to be shared, plus some aids for group collaboration. Groove users can create workspaces, add documents, and invite other Groove members to a workspace. A user that responds to an invitation is made an active member of that workspace. Each member has a privately editable copy of the workspace. Users interact and collaborate in the common workspace which is a private virtual location. All changes are tracked by Groove, sent to all members and all copies of the workspace are synchronized via the network in a peer-to-peer manner

Mobile Commerce: NordstromM-commerce is a term that is used to refer to the growing practice of conducting financial and promotional activities with the use of a wireless handheld device. The term m-commerce is short for mobile commerce, and recognizes that the transactions may be conducted using cell phones, personal digital assistants and other hand held devices that have operate with Internet access. While still in its infancy, the concept of m-commerce has been refined in recent years and is beginning to become more popular

Department store chain Nordstrom is continuing its slow-yet-steady emergence into mobile with the

commencement of mobile check-out in its retail locations. Sales associates are now able to look up

past purchases via the iPod touch and spend more time with consumers on the floor, which will

probably boost Nordstrom’s already-lauded customer service reputation.

2. Select an ecommerce B2C e-tailer company. Visit its Web site and describe its business model based on the information you find there. Identify its customer value proposition, its revenue model, the marketspace it operates in, who its main competitors are, any comparative advantages you believe the company possesses and what its market strategy appears to be. Also try to locate information about the company’s management team and organizational structure. (Check for a page labelled “the Company,” “About Us,” or something similar).

AMAZON.COM

Business Model

Amazon.com has been seen as the traditional model of an E-Tailer selling products over the web. Starting with a broad range of books, by today there is almost none product which cannot be bought at Amazon. Furthermore Amazon became one of the most prominent companies in the area of Cloud Computing. The Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) and the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) API are driving the infrastructure as a service concept by providing storage and computing power on demand.

Customer Value PropositionAmazon's value proposition centres on service and selection. Delivering a first-class customer experience depends upon a focused approach with each transaction. Focused service includes a "value-chain" process from the customer contact to the shipping systems used. Amazon's executives spend millions of dollars each year on improvement of the web site and the value proposition strategy. The company web site includes a design and graphics specific directed towards a customer value strategy.

Revenue ModelAmazon generates revenue primarily by selling books, videos, electronics, and kitchen equipment on domestic and international Web sites, such as Amazon Marketplace.Amazon Marketplace is Amazon.com’s fixed price online marketplace that allows sellers to offer their goods alongside Amazon’s offerings. Buyers can buy new and used items sold directly by a third party through Amazon.com using Amazon Marketplace. This sales strategy and program has been very profitable for Amazon.com. Amazon charges a commission rate based on the sale price, a transaction fee, and a variable closing fee. Moreover, Amazon.com also generates revenue by Affiliate revenue model. Amazon was one of the first online businesses to set up an affiliate marketing program. AStore is an Amazon.com affiliate product which website owners can use to create an online store on their site. The store does not allow website owners to sell their own products directly. Website owners pick products from Amazon’s store and earn referral fees on the products purchased by their readers. The fee structure is currently the same as for the other affiliate links and ranges from 4% to 10% of the product price.

Market SpaceAmazon started off as an internet-based book store. Over the years, they diversified their business and have now expanded into a large number of sectors like:

Videos MP3s and Cloud Player Amazon Cloud Drive Kindle Appstore for Android Digital Games and Software Audio books Movies, Music and games Electronics and Computers Home, Garden and Tools Grocery, health and beauty Toys, kids and baby Clothing, Shoes and Jewellery Sports and Outdoors Automotive and Industrial.

CompetitionOver the years, many businesses have tried to follow the model of Amazon and have resulted in a lot of competition for Amazon. Some of their competitors are:

EBay eMusic Netflix Best-Deals.com Alibaba.com

Comparative Advantages Amazon strives to create value for the customer by offering a combination of the following benefits:

Shopping convenience Ease of purchase Speed Decision-enabling information A wide selection Discounted pricing Reliability of order fulfilment

Amazon has achieved enormous success and has been able to stay ahead of the competition because it has a model which is a synergistic combination of all of these services and processes that create value for customer.

Market StrategyAmazon.com bases its marketing stratagem on six pillars.

It freely proffers products and services. It uses a customer-friendly interface. It scales easily from small to large. It exploits its affiliate’s products and resources. It uses existing communication systems. It utilizes universal behaviours and mentalities.

Much of its marketing is subliminal or indirect – it does not run $1 million dollar ads during Super Bowls nor post flyers in mall marketplaces. Amazon.com relies on wily online ploys, strong partner relations and a constant declaration of quality to market itself to the masses.

Management Team and Organizational Structure

3. Visit the MySimon.com Web site and investigate the following types of purchases: an iPod, a copy of the book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (by Stieg Larsson), and a dozen red roses. What did you find as you searched for these items? Describe the process, the search results, and any limitations you encountered. What are the major advantages and disadvantages of such intelligent agents?

The following are the findings when we search for items in the website MySimon.com

Results for the searchThe results for the actual product search are displayed in the centre of the page. This includes a picture of the product, a brief description, the best price and the various sources from where the product can be bought.

Related WordsTo the top left of the page, the site shows a list of keywords related to the search string (if any). The related words in case of an ipod were as follows:

Matching Shopping PicksThis list appears below the list of related words. This displays a list of other items which the customer might prefer to shop for. This list is generated based on the current search item.

Matching Consumer ReportsThe next section displays a list of consumer reports related to the search string if any such report exists. Of the 3 samples tested, iPod and the novel displayed a list of reports while roses did not have any reports.

ADSThe last segment of the search screen consists of advertisements for products related to the search item. They appear in 2 sections as shown below

IPOD

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Dozen Red Roses

Some of the limitations of these intelligent agents are:

No overall system controller: Intelligent agents may not be appropriate where there are global constraints that need to be enforced, due to the fact that each agent is effectively acting independently of any central controller. Applications requiring real-time responses are also inappropriate.

No global perspective: an agent can only make decisions based on locally accumulated knowledge; therefore an agent might be missing the "big picture" of a problem domain.

Trusting delegation: a user of an intelligent agent is effectively giving responsibility of data acquisition and decision making to a piece of computer code, therefore they must be sure that they can trust the agent to carry out the delegated task with integrity

Advantages of Intelligence agents

Personalized help with boring or time-consuming tasks Ability to concentrate on key task/data Ability to deal with larger quantities of information Automation of many common functions Free up user’s time for more difficult tasks Capture interactions (for data mining) Many are inexpensive or free

4. Visit REI.com and rate its performance on the eight factors listed in Table 4.10 on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest). Provide reasons for you ratings.

Functionality RATING: 9The page has lots of options on both the top of the page and along the left side of the screen. The only issues I saw on their pages were figuring out which subcategories go with each item you wish to purchase. I wanted to find Long Johns, and I searched under men’s wear, and I had to search both the pictures and all the sub categories on the side before I was able to narrow it down. The search option worked very well if I had taken that route though.

Informational RATING: 9The link worked great and you can easily find any item you are looking for, the only issue that came to mind was information overload. There were links all over the page and with the dropdown option adding more options, it was a little discouraging. Ease of Use RATING: 10The pages were easy to use. One click took you to another page, when you found the next page you were able to narrow down your field with numerous options, such as price, brand, and so on.

Redundant Navigation RATING: 8REI has used numerous ways of finding information. You can click a picture, click the initial link of the left side of the page, or choose from their dropdown options at the top of the page.

Ease of Purchase RATING: 9The website makes you choose from numerous items for sizing an item and then it wants you to register. It is pretty nice that they allow you to get free shipping if you pick up at the store and it shows you the closest stores to you for convenience. The reason why this did not get a 10 is that if you were not used to buying items online, it may be a little confusing to buy the product.

Multi-Browser Functionality RATING: 10Interoperability between browsers was not an issue at all. I tested this website in Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. IT worked fine and was consistent across all the browsers.

Simple Graphics RATING: 9For the most part there is very limited number of extra pictures, but a few of the links/photos are big and bulky for what seems to be little reason. I am sure it is to lead you into something we probably don’t want, but they want us to have, and I could do without that. The other links are more like a forum and they have so many it requires its own sliding section to fit in the page.

Legible text RATING: 9. Majority of the texts were very legible, but some on the front page were a little close together and had somewhat smaller font than the rest of the page, making them a little harder to read.