Ecommerce
Essays

In the first month of this year, 2012, online shoe retailer Zappos' now a business unit of Amazon, experienced a security breach that was initiated from a distribution center located in Kentucky. The nature of the breach shows how vulnerable the retailer's systems are to employees who choose to break in and attempt successfully to gain access to customer records. It also showed how vulnerable the entire Amazon.com e-commerce system is attacks originating from internal servers. The hacker, an employee, gained access to over 24 million Amazon.com and Zappos' customer records. Despite having sophisticated 128-bit encryption on these systems, the hacker was able to bypass internal systems with knowledge of how the distribution center staff had constructed firewalls and password conventions. The last four digits of the customers' credit cards were taken, their names, addresses, complete customer histories and approval credit limits of they had obtained Amazon.com credit cards (Letzing, 2012). The security systems had not been upgraded since 2010 when Zappos had been purchased for $800 million by Amazon.com and made a core part of the overall company network (Hsieh, 2010). As Zappos' had superior technologies for logistics planning and execution, supply chain planning and execution, and the ability to orchestrate fulfillment with 3rd party logistics providers, Jeff Bezos made the decision to standardize on Zappos' technologies and websites (McDonald, 2011). Zappos' had also created a unique series of technologies that allowed for consumers to inspect entire series of items online and evaluate how they will look in them (Tsuruoka, 2012). Zappos' had also created an entire corporate culture predicated on delivering exceptionally positive, memorable experiences for anyone purchasing online from them, empowering customer service teams to do whatever it could within the boundaries of profitability and legality to exceed customers' expectations (Tsuruoka, 2012). The theft of 24 million records was even more surprising given how strong of a culture the company has, one known for promoting worker autonomy and giving them as much freedom as they need to do their jobs (Shine, 2012). The theft had been motivated by the potential to sell the names on the black market for tens of thousands of dollars, a temptation even the relatively well-paid employees of Amazxon.com could not pass up (Letzing, 2012). The breach was discovered within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team's audits were completed of transactions across all subsidiaries, including a reconciliation of accesses by role (Letzing, 2012). If Amazon was not able to track the access points and roles of associates looking at data online, chances are this breach would have not been fully found. Given the highly analytical nature of the Amazon.com culture within the AWS business unit, the discovery and reaction to the breach within hours highlights why e-commerce companies need to consider partnering with cloud platform providers for the long-term (Tsuruoka, 2012). If Zappos' had been in the position of hosting their own website and relying on their own infrastructure, the breach may potentially have never found to the extent to which it happened (Letzing, 2012).

Diversity as a management style in Fortune 500 companies:

TYPE of Business: More consumers than ever before are jumping online -- and buying online. That's because more consumers are comfortable buying goods via Web sites. In fact, recent studies indicate that even consumers…

The contemporary trends in the business environment are more and more supportive of the annulment of barriers between markets. Instead of a multitude of markets one could almost speak about a global market where all the…

Both articles and their extensive empirical and theoretical research have a wealth of insights and intelligence that brings e-commerce into a more realistic and pragmatic perspective. Starting with Exploring E-commerce benefits for businesses in a developing country (Molla, Heeks, 2007) that authors explain how they have interviewed 92 businesses in South Africa who have moved beyond the basic stage of ecommerce as defined by the 6-point e-commerce capability indicator cited in their article (Molla, Heeks, 2007). In citing this scale the authors contend that the much-hyped benefits of e-commerce surrounding operating efficiency gains including lower transaction costs and greater fluidity and flexibility of e-commerce are in fact not occurring in the emerging economy of South Africa. Instead, the authors state that the greatest gains are being made in the area of intra- and interorganizational communication and collaboration, clustered primarily in services industry as evidenced by their cited research (Molla, Heeks, 2007). This is certainly the case in Brazil where the continued growth of e-commerce has succeed while other nations have failed mainly due to the exceptional stability of the nations' banking system, strong laws and regulations to protect e-commerce and online commerce, and an infrastructure that makes automating supply chains more achievable than many other regions and nations of the world (Paulo, Dedrick, 2004). Brazil is also unique in that is government subsidizes new ventures and seeks out global technology partners, including Intel, for its e-commerce and infrastructure-dependent industries (Callaway, 2008). Juxtaposing the growth of Brazil is the stagnation of South Africa as is shown in the analysis, which implies e-commerce is better at breaking down the walls of organizations and getting them to work together more effectively than it is in driving top-line revenue from transactions., This consistent with the more pragmatic and practical studies of e-commerce adoption in emerging nations that show e-commerce system development and implementation will teach a business more about itself than it had never considered prior to the implementation (Alemayehu, Heeks, 2007). The process of creating an e-commerce strategy including the process and system integration, coordination of product and services catalogues, redefining and clarification of pricing, and the ability to define expediting processes for service and service recovery of negative customer events all force a business to grow faster than it had anticipated (Standing, Benson, 2000). Small businesses enter e-commerce thinking the big pay-off will be increased top-line revenue growth and greater transaction efficiencies (Molla, Heeks, 2007). Small businesses in commodity driven industries will also do this to specifically drive down the cost per transaction and pool purchasing power to gain an advantage in negotiating with suppliers (Salcedo, Henry, Rubio, 2003). All of these actual benefits are completely different than the much-hyped and promoted benefits of e-commerce being frictionless commerce throughout a supply chain, greater revenue growth at lower transaction costs, and ease and speed of generating customer loyalty, all contributing to skyrocketing profitability of an enterprise (Romano, 2009). All of these benefits accrue, in actuality, to oligopolistic firms who have the infrastructure, from a corporate IT staff to a well-known brand and the ability to selectively disintermediate their own supply chain to gain the much-hyped transaction cost efficiencies (Molla, Heeks, 2007). The greater the global market power of a company and its commanding position in an oligopoly, the more it can enforce its market-maker statue and drive change (Alemayehu, Heeks, 2007). Molla and Heeks (2007) deflate the hype of Transaction Cost Theory and its corollary of disintermediation by showing through their research that perfect competition doesn't exist in e-commerce globally and is especially problematic in emerging countries due to the lack of value chain integration and transparency. The authors also make an excellent point that the main catalysts or fuel of e-commerce growth in many nations is market research and mass customization (Molla, Heeks, 2007). There are myriad of examples of how e-commerce combined with mass customization has led to explosive, profitable growth on the part of companies with Dell not only reaching over $1B in revenues from online sales but also achieving double-digit inventory turns and extensive operational efficiencies at the same time (Luo, John, Du, 2005). The authors contend that for many emerging nations this however is not possible given the lack of trust and adoption of e-commerce, and the lack of alacrity and accuracy in complex supply chain relationships including a lack of clarity in communications and procurement performance (Molla, Heeks, 2007). Contrasting this however are the effects of a stabilized and trusted banking system in Brazil for example (Brazilian e-Commerce, 2005). The greater the trust levels in a given nation's financial system the higher the level of e-commerce adoption, even in highly collectivist cultures (Joia, Sanz, 2005). The authors continue with a triangulation of market performance, communications and transaction cost reduction, showing how e-commerce is more of a catalyst of organizational synchronization than a platform for selling more online (Molla, Heeks, 2007).

Computer Software Is Still a Major Barrier to Wireless Information Systems

The future trends in the internet banking arena

E-business will affect project management by creating resources for individuals or teams. Newsgroups or online forums encourage and manage online text discussions over a period of time among members of special interest…

Nintendo's global leadership in the development, marketing, promotion, sales and service of their best-selling gaming modules, gaming software and interactive games has also created exceptional growth for third party…

Organizational survival and success are predicated on the establishment of a strategic orientation and a set of clear, realistic and relevant policies intended to drive this strategy.