This paper examines three major consequences of increased information density in e-commerce: guided selling, online security challenges, and enterprise analytics. It then analyzes the value propositions of three distinct business models — PayPal (C2C), General Electric (B2B), and Microsoft Live Messenger (P2P) — explaining how e-commerce technologies support their respective objectives. Finally, the paper explores emerging mobile technologies, focusing on location-based services delivered over cellular networks, and weighs their benefits against privacy and security risks. Together, these analyses illustrate how information density is reshaping commerce, security, and consumer experience across digital platforms.
Of the many consequences of increased information density on selling and buying products online, three of the most significant stand out. These are the emergence of guided selling, the intensification of online security demands, and the growing need for enterprise-wide analytics platforms.
The first consequence is the need on the part of 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 full spectrum of products and services. Guided selling is comparable to having an organization's best salesperson available online at all times.
The second consequence of increased information density is the need for more efficient forms of online security and safeguards for both sellers and buyers (Gorman, 2007). Security must be specifically designed to protect both parties, addressing the most vulnerable areas of a website's content, catalog, and transaction management systems, while also protecting the identity and purchasing details of customers buying online (Richardson & Midwinter, 2006).
Information density, combined with the increasing sophistication of hackers who perceive complexity as a means to circumvent a system's safeguards, presents a pervasive global threat. The exponential increase in information density has provided hackers with an opportunity to exploit that complexity and gain access to online ordering and selling systems, stealing the financial identities of tens of thousands of individuals in the process. Online security will therefore continue to be one of the most critical aspects of selling and buying products online, and the exponential growth of information density will further complicate the task of creating effective safeguards for both buyers and sellers.
Online security is also becoming increasingly important in the context of system integration. E-commerce websites and their applications often require integration with legacy systems that are in many cases more than ten years old, creating the potential for security breaches. Because these legacy systems frequently contain pricing and product availability data, their integration with Web-based applications is both technically critical and fraught with security challenges. Given the influx of information and its density, there is an exponential rise in threats to legacy systems through these integration points and through new website applications as well (Gorman, 2007).
A third major consequence of increased information density is the need for enterprise-wide analytics applications and entire computing platforms dedicated to interpreting and capitalizing on the insights contained within that data. The use of analytics in scenarios focused on online selling and buying has also proven to be recession-resilient (McKnight, 2009). Predictive analytics in particular have attracted increased interest due to their utility in forecasting economic conditions, identifying new and emerging markets with revenue growth potential, and defining entirely new product categories. The growth of Business Intelligence (BI) specifically is expected to increase exponentially over time, driven by the continued growth and diversity of information density.
The Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C), Business-to-Business (B2B), and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) companies examined here are PayPal, General Electric, and Microsoft's Live Messenger, respectively.
PayPal's value proposition is the ability to provide merchant services anytime, anywhere, to anyone with access to a browser. It functions as a universal payment exchange that relies on nothing more than an email address to enable one person or company to pay another. This is a genuinely distinctive payment gateway, as it depends 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: offering a suite of financial services comparable to those of a bank, while also encompassing a payment processing center.
Central to PayPal's value proposition is a series of distributed order management and transaction management systems that provide scalability across the millions of transactions completed daily. The company also operates over two dozen websites, each in a specific international language, enabling customers from each country to navigate and use the service with ease. Additionally, PayPal relies on an infrastructure-based approach to managing all transaction information through a Master Data Management (MDM) repository used for tracking and backing up transactions. Like any large e-commerce operation, PayPal depends on an enterprise-wide infrastructure for system-wide integration, requiring a complex network of integration points and websites to deliver its services on a global scale.
The Business-to-Business (B2B) model is used specifically to connect one company with another for the purpose 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 parts stocking levels, and ordered services for key customers. The front-end websites of these PTX platforms 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 is redefining the efficiency of e-commerce for B2B companies including General Electric (Chelariu & Sangtani, 2009). The accumulation of these largely hidden, password-protected portals is also redefining B2B branding and the value propositions on which these services are based (Wise & Zednickova, 2009).
The last business model discussed is Peer-to-Peer (P2P). This model is based on the egalitarian sharing of information between two people or entities. There are literally hundreds of companies using this approach to share information through purpose-built applications, with one of the most well-known examples being Napster for music sharing. P2P is also prevalent in instant messaging, with Microsoft's Live Messenger serving as a case in point. The Live Messenger architecture and its hosted versions support instantaneous connection and communication between two or more people. The value proposition of P2P lies in its ability to use a wide variety of devices — from Web-enabled mobile phones to PCs and laptops — to enable real-time communication between individuals and groups.
"Location-based mobile services, benefits, and risks"
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