introduction to e business

E-Business and E-Commerce

Identify and explain briefly three consequences that increased information density can bring selling and buying products online.

Of the many consequences of increased information density on selling and buying products online, the three most prevalent are defined in this short essay. The first is the need on the part of those companies selling online to guide their customers to the best possible combination of products and services. Called guided selling (Lager, 2006) this is strategically important for any company selling online as it provides navigation to prospects and customers across the spectrum of products and services. Guided selling is comparable to having an organizations' best salesperson online.

The second consequence of increase information density is the need for more efficient forms of online security and safeguards for both sellers and buyers online (Gorman, 2007). Security must be specifically designed to support the protection of both the buyer and the seller online, addressing most vulnerable areas of a websites' content, catalog and transaction management systems while also protecting the identity and purchasing specifics of the customers buying online (Richardson, Midwinter, 2006). Information density in conjunction with the increasing complexity and sophistication of hackers who perceive complexity as a means to circumvent a system's safeguards are pervasive globally today. The exponential increase in information density has provided an opportunity for hackers to capitalize on its complexity and gain access to online ordering and selling systems, stealing tens of thousands of persons' financial identities in the process. Online security will continue to be one of the most critical aspects of selling and buying products online. The exponential growth of information and its resulting density will also exacerbate and make more difficult the task of creating safeguards for buyer and seller security. Online security also is becoming increasingly important in the context of system integration. As e-commerce websites and their applications often require integration to legacy systems and applications that are in many cases over ten or more years old, the potential exists for security breaches to occur. As these systems often having pricing and product availability data included within them, their integration to Web-based applications is critical. This is a challenging technical task yet also one that is fraught with potential security challenges as well. Given the influx of information and its density, there is an exponential rise in the threats to legacy systems through these integration points, and through the new applications on websites as well (Gorman, 2007).

A third major consequence of the increased information density is the need for enterprise-wide analytics applications and entire computing platforms dedicated to interpreting and taking advantage of the data insights within it. The use of analytics specifically in scenarios focused on selling and buying online is also proving to be recession-resilient as well (McKnight, 2009). Predictive analytics specifically are of increased interest and use due to the need for predicting economic conditions, defining new, emerging markets that have the potential to lead to new revenue growth, and also create entirely new definitions of product categories as well. The growth of Business Intelligence (BI) specifically is going to exponentially increase over time due to the growth and diversity of information density.

2) Chose one C2C, one B2B and one P2P company and explain their value propositions and in what ways e-commerce technologies support their business objectives.

The Consumer to Consumer (C2C), Business-to-Business (B2B) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) companies discussed in this analysis are PayPal, General Electric and Microsoft's Instant Messaging applications and outsourced services. PayPal's value proposition is the concept of being able to provide merchant services anytime, anywhere, to anyone who has access to a browser. It is a universal payment exchange that only relies on an e-mail address to enable one person or company paying another. This is truly unique as a payment gateway as it relies heavily on security services (Gorman, 2007) that provide identity validation and verification in addition to payment processing verification and deposits. The full functionality of the PayPal gateway illustrates its unique value proposition of providing a series of financial services comparable to a bank, yet encompassing a payment processing center as well. Critical to PayPal's unique value proposition is the use of a series of distributed order management and transaction management systems that provide for scalability across the millions of transactions completed daily. In addition, PayPal has over two dozen websites, each in a specific international language, so that customers from each nation will be able to quickly navigate and use the service. Third, the company also relies on an infrastructure-based approach to managing all transaction information through a Master Data Management (MDM) repository that is used for tracking all transactions and then backing them up. As with any large e-commerce operation, PayPal relies on an enterprise-wide infrastructure for managing system-wide integration as well. It takes a complex of system integration points and websites to provide the PayPal service on a global scale. The second business model, Business-to-Business (B2B) is used specifically for connecting one company to another for purposes of completing business transactions. General Electric's use of B2B-oriented websites begins with behind-the-firewall private trading exchanges (PTX) that give the company the ability to tailor distributed order management, pricing, replacement products and parts stocking levels, and ordered services on the part of their key customers. These websites that form the front-end of the PTX platform are not accessible to the outside world, given the complexity, cost and depth of these applications they are most often protected behind password-encrypted screens. The use of these distributed, enterprise-wide applications however is redefining the efficiency of e-commerce for B2B companies including General Electric and others (Chelariu, Sangtani, 2009). The accumulation of these websites, mostly hidden through password protected portals, is also redefining B2B branding and the unique value proposition that these services are based on (Wise, Zednickova, 2009).

The last of the business models discussed is Peer-to-Peer or P2P. This specific business model is based on egalitarian-based sharing of information between two people or entities. There are literally hundreds of companies using this approach to share information based on applications developed, with the most notorious being Napster for music sharing for example. The use of P2P is prevalent in Instant messaging with Microsoft's Live messenger being a case in point. The Live Messenger architecture and hosted versions support instantaneous connection and communication between two or more people. The value position of P2P is the ability to use a multitude of devices, from Web-enabled cell phones to actual PCs and laptops, to communicate between two or more groups in real-time.

3) What new applications or technologies do you see being available in the future on your mobile phone, other than mobile phone payments? Explain the benefits and risk associated with those application or technologies.

Mobile technologies are gaining in intelligence and insight, sophistication and security quite rapidly. One of the most important new technologies is the ability to define location-based advertising and promotion to cellular phones and all Web-enabled devices through locational server technology (Chakravorty, Agarwal, Banerjee, Pratt, 2007). This will allow for personalization of Web-based content of specific cellular phones and also initially create an entirely new advertising-based model. There is also the potential of having location-based servers also deliver personalized news alerts and financial account alerts based on authentication and personalization settings. The use of the mobile phone as a GPS device capable of specifically defining a person's location and their context to stores, shops, restaurants and learning institutions of interest is the foundation of location-based services (Junglas, Watson, 2008).

The benefits of these location-based services over cellular networks include more efficient use of data for making purchasing, services or investment decisions and the ability to take advantage of special offers and discounts as consumers pass stores and shops of interest. There is also the advantage of being able to create more effective marketing campaigns on the part of shop owners in general and retailers specifically.