Final Exam INSY 3330
Internet Backbone
- High-capacity fibre optic cables laid on land and under the sea - Owned by companies who rent out capacity on the cables - They connect countries together to form the global Internet so are extremely important - Having multiple backbone cable connections provides extra capacity and redundancy
Trademark
A mark used to identify and distinguish goods and indicate their source. Protections exists at both the federal and state levels in the United States. Protects the public in the marketplace by ensuring that it gets what it pays for and wants to receive and protects the owner who has spent the time, money, and energy bringing the product to the marketplace against piracy and misappropriation. Have been extended from single words to pictures, shapes, packaging, and colors. Common words that are merely descriptive can not be trademarked. Are obtained by use in the interstate commerce and by registration with the U.S. patent and trademark office (USPTO). They are granted for a period of 10 years and can be renewed indefinitely. The test for infringement is market confusion and bad faith.
No Free Lunch
Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone else unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. If something someone else has created is useful to you, it has value and you should assume the creator wants compensation for this work.
Web 2.0
Beginning in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone, to the present day, e-commerce has been transformed yet again by the rapid growth of Web 2.0 D (a set of applications and technologies that enable user-generated content, such as that posted on online social networks, blogs, wikis, and video- and photo-sharing websites and apps; widespread adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers; the expansion of e-commerce to include local goods and services; and the emergence of an on-demand service economy enabled by millions of apps on mobile devices and cloud computing. This period can be seen as both a sociological, as well as a technological and business phenomenon. The defining characteristics of this period are often characterized as the "social, mobile, local "online world. Entertainment content has developed as a major source of e-commerce A revenues and mobile devices have become entertainment centers, as well as on-the-go shopping devices for retail goods and services. Marketing has been transformed by the increasing use of social networks, word-of-mouth, viral marketing, and much more powerful data repositories and analytic tools for truly personal marketing. Firms have greatly expanded their online presence by moving beyond static web pages to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram in an attempt to surround the online consumer with coordinated marketing messages. These social networks share many common characteristics. First, they rely on user-generated content. "Regular" people (not just experts or professionals) are creating, sharing, and broadcasting content to huge audiences. They are inherently highly interactive, creating new opportunities for people to socially connect to others. They attract extremely large audiences (over 2.2 billion monthly active users worldwide as of March 2018 in the case of Facebook). These audiences present marketers with extraordinary opportunities for targeted marketing and advertising.
Spyware
Can be used to obtain information such as a user's keystrokes, copies of e-mail and instant messaging, and even take screenshots (and thereby capture passwords or other confidential data).
Security
Data collectors must take reasonable steps to assure that consumer information is accurate and secure from unauthorized use.
PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
Defined as any data that can used to identify, locate, or contact an individual.
Internet Auction Costs
Delayed consumption costs - internet auctions can go on for days, and shipping will take additional time Monitoring costs - participation in auctions requires your time to monitor bidding Equipment costs - internet auctions require you to purchase a computer system and pay for internet access Fulfillment cost - typically, the buyer pays fulfillment costs of packing, shipping, and insurance, whereas a physical store these costs are included in the retail price
Worm
Designed to spread from computer to computer. It does not need to be activated by a user or program in order to replicate itself. is designed to spread from computer to computer. A worm does not necessarily need to be activated by a user or program in order for it to replicate itself. The Slammer worm is one of the most notorious. Slammer targeted a known vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server database software and infected more than 90% of vulnerable computers worldwide within 10 minutes of its release on the Internet; crashed Bank of America cash machines, especially in the southwestern part of the United States; affected cash registers at supermarkets such as the Publix chain in Atlanta, where staff could not dispense cash to frustrated buyers; and took down most Internet connections in South Korea, causing a dip in the stock market there. The Conficker worm (also known as Downad), Which first appeared in 2008, is the most significant worm since Slammer, and reportedly infected 11 million computers worldwide (Microsoft, 2015). Originally designed to establish a global botnet, a massive industry effort has defeated this effort, but in 2017, Conficker was resurrected by hackers to aid in infecting computers with WannaCry ransomware, described below. It is still one of the most prevalent malware threats on the Internet (Scmagazine.com, 2017:TrendMicro,2017).
Slippery slope
If an action cannot be taken repeatedly then it is not right to take at all. An action may appear to work in one instance to solve a problem, but if repeated, would result in a negative outcome.
Universalism
If an action is not right for all situations, then it is not right for any specific situation "If we adopted this this rule in every case, could the organization, or society, survive?"
COPPA
In 1998 congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act after the FTC discovered that 80% of websites were collecting personal information from children, but only 1% required their parents permission. Under COPPA, companies must post a privacy policy on their websites, detailing exactly how they collect information from consumers, how they'll use it, and the degrees to which they'll protect consumer privacy. Companies are not permitted to use personal information collected from children under 13 years of age without the verifiable prior consent of parents.
Symmetric Key Encryption
In this key cryptography, both the sender and the receiver use the same key to encrypt and decrypt the message. They both have the same key by sending it over some communication media or exchanging the key in person. Unfortunately, these older means of encryption can be broken quickly with today's powerful computers, and secondly, it requires that both parties share the same key. In order to do this, it must be sent over a potential insecure medium where it can be stolen and used to decipher the message. In commercial use, this would also be difficult due to the fact that you would need a secret key for each of the parties with whom you transact (customers). The strength of modern security protection is measured in terms of the length of the binary key used to encrypt the data. In the preceding example, the eight-bit key is easily deciphered because there are only 256 possibilities. If the intruder knows you are using an eight-bit key, then he or she could decode the message in a few seconds using a modern desktop PC just by using the brute force method of checking each possible key. For this reason, modern digital encryption systems use keys with 56, 128, 256, or 512 binary digits. With encryption keys of 512 digits, it is estimated that all the computers in the world would need to work for 10 years before stumbling upon the answer.
Active Server Pages (ASP)
Microsoft's original version of server side programming for Windows. Enables developers to easily create and open records from a database and execute programs within and HTML page, as well as handle various forms of interactivity found on e-commerce sites. Permits an interaction to take place between the browser and the server and uses the same standards as CGI for communication with the browser.
4 Layers of the Internet
Network technology substrates - layer of internet technology that is composed of telecommunications networks and protocols Transport services and representation standards - houses the TCP/IP protocol Applications layer - contains client applications such as the web, email, and audio or video playback Middleware service layer - the glue that ties the applications to the communications network and include such services as security, authentication, addresses and storage repositories
FIP (Fair Information Practices) Principles
Notice/ Awareness Choice/ Consent Access/ Participation Security Enforcement
Internet Auctions
Provides a global environment and very low fixed and operational costs for the aggregation of huge buyer audiences, composed of millions of consumers worldwide, who can use a universally available technology to shop for goods.
System Architecture
Refers to the arrangement of software, machinery, and tasks in an information system needed to achieve a specific functionality (much like a home's architecture refers to the arrangement of building materials to achieve a particular functionality).
Online Advertising (4 Main Methods)
Search, banners, video, and rich media
Market Biases
Seller Biased Buyer Biased Neutral
Notice/ Awareness
Sites must disclose their information practices before collecting data. Includes identification of collector, uses of data, other recipients of data, nature of collection (active/ inactive), voluntary or required, consequences of refusal, and steps taken to protect confidentiality, integrity, and quality of the data.
Social Marketing
The objective is to encourage your potential customers to become fans of your company' products and services, and engage with your business by entering into a conversation with it. Your further objective is to encourage your business fans to share their enthusiasm with their friends, and in so doing create a community of fans online. Ultimately, the point is to strengthen the brand and drive sales, and do this by increasing tour "share of online conversation." There is some reason to believe that social marketing is more cost effective than traditional marketing although this is still being explored.
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)/ICP
TCP - establishes the connections among sending and receiving computers, and makes sure that packets sent by one computer are received in the same sequence by the other without any packets missing IP - provides the internet's addressing scheme and is responsible for the actual delivery of packets
Collective Utilitarian
Take the action that achieves the greater value for all of society. This rule assumes you can prioritize values in a rank order and understand the consequences of various courses of action.
Packet
The defined block of information consists of a header, data, and trailer that serves as the information exchange method on the network.
View-Through Rate
The percentage of viewers that visit an advertiser's site, either by clicking on an ad at the time advertised, or by visiting the advertiser's site later.
Enforcement
There must be a mechanism to enforce FIP principles in place. This can involve self-regulation, legislation giving consumers legal remedies for violations, or federal statutes and regulations.
Internet Auction Risks
Trust risks - online auctions are a significant source of internet fraud. Using auctions increases the risk of experiencing a loss.
Web Beacon
Web beacons are tiny (1-pixel) graphic files embedded in email messages and on websites. Web beacons are used to automatically transmit information about the user and the page being viewed to a monitoring server in order to collect personal browsing behavior and other personal information. For instance, when a recipient opens an email in HTML format or opens a web page, a message is sent to a server calling for graphic information. This tells the marketer that the email was opened, indicating that the recipient was at least interested in the subject header. Web beacons are not visible to other users. They are often clear or colored white so they are not visible to the recipient. You may by able to determine if a web page is using web beacons by using the view source option of your browser and examining the IMG (image) tags on the page. As noted above, web beacons are typically one pixel in size and contain the URL of a server that differs from the one that served the page itself.
Comprehensive Multi-Channel Marketing
Web site, traditional online marketing, social marketing, mobile marketing, and offline marketing.
Transaction Fee Revenue Model
a company receives a fee for enabling or executing a transaction. For example, eBay provides an auction marketplace and receives a small transaction fee from a seller if the seller is successful in selling the item. E*Trade, a financial services provider, receives transaction fees each time it executes a stock transaction on behalf of a customer.
Advertising Revenue Model
a company that offers content, services, and/or products also provides a forum for advertisements and receives fees from advertisers. Companies that are able to attract the greatest viewership or that have a highly specialized, differentiated viewership and are able to retain user attention ("stickiness") are able to charge higher advertising rates. Yahoo, for instance, derives a significant amount of revenue from display and video advertising.
Freemium Pricing
a cross-subsidy online marketing strategy where users are offered a basic service for free, but must pay for premium or add-on services. The people who pay for the premium services will hopefully pay for all the free riders on the service.
Content Management System (CMS)
a database software program designed to manage structures and unstructured data and object in a Web site environment; organizes, stores and processes Web site content
Marketspace
a marketplace extended beyond traditional boundaries and removed from a temporal and geographic location.
HTML5
a markup language that enables more dynamic web content and allows for browser accessible web apps that are as appealing as device specific apps.
Intranet
a network designed for the exclusive use of computer users within an organization that cannot be accessed by users outside the organization
Domain Name System (DNS)
allows expressions such as google.com to stand for a numerical IP address (google.com's numeric IP is 172.217.12.206)
Scale Economies
are efficiencies that result from increasing the size of a business, for instance, when large, fixed-cost production systems (such as factories or software systems) can be operated at full capacity with no idle time. In the case of software, the marginal cost of a digital copy of a software program is nearly zero, and finding additional buyers for an expensive software program is exceptionally profitable. This is much more efficient than having every firm build its own supply chain management system, and it permits firms such as Aria to specialize and offer their software to firms at a cost far less than the cost of developing it.
Proxy Server
are software servers (often dedicated computers) that handle all communications originating from or being sent to the internet by local clients, acting as a spokesperson or bodyguard for the organization. Proxies act primarily to limit access of internal clients to external internet servers, although some proxy servers act as firewalls as well. Proxy servers are sometimes called dual-home systems because they have two network interfaces. For internal computers, a proxy server is known as the gateway, while for external computers it is known as a mail server or numeric address. When a user on an internal network requests a web page, the request is routed first to the proxy server. The proxy server validates the user and the nature of the request, and then sends the request onto the internet. A web page sent by an external internet server first passes to the proxy server. If acceptable, the web page passes onto the internal network web server and then to the client desktop. By prohibiting users from communicating directly with the internet, companies can restrict access to certain types of sites, such as pornographic, auction, or stock-trading sites. Proxy servers also improve web performance by storing frequently-requested web pages locally, reducing upload times, and hiding the internal network's address, thus making it more difficult for hackers to monitor.
Access/Participation
consumer should be able to review and contest the accuracy and completeness of data collected about them in a timely, inexpensive process.
Versioning
creating multiple versions of the different market segments at different prices. In this situation, the price depends on the value to the cogroups that are willing to pay different amounts for various versions. Versioning fits well with a modified "offered for free, while premium versions can be offered at higher prices. What are characteristics of a "reformation goods, even "free"-versions might be less convenient to use, less comprehensive, slower, n-priced versions. Just as there are different General Motors car brands appealing to different market and within these divisions, hundreds of models from the most basic to the more powerful and functional, to segment and target the market and position the products. In the realm of information goods. online may offer sample content for free, but charge for more powerful content. The New York Times, for instance, a month online for free, but if you want to read more, you must have a digital subscription. Some websites turn off the ads for a monthly fee.
Value Proposition
defines how a company's product or service fulfills the needs of customers. To develop and/or analyze a firms value proposition you need to understand why customers will choose to do business with the firm instead of another company and what the firm provides that the other firm do not or cannot. From the customers point of view, successful e-commerce value propositions include personalization and customization of product offerings, reduction of product search costs, reduction of price discovery costs, and facilitation of transactions by managing product delivery.
ActiveX
invented by Microsoft to compete with Java. When a browser receives an HTML page with an ActiveX control the browser simply executes the program. Unlike Java it has full access to all the client's resources-printers, networks, and hard drives. Only work if you are using Internet Explorer but is not included in Microsoft edge because the need was significantly reduced given the capabilities of HTML5 and eliminating them will enhance browser security.
Geo-fencing
identify a perimeter around a physical location, and then target ads to users within that perimeter, recommending actions possible within the fenced-in area. The perimeter can be hundreds of feet (in urban areas) to several miles (in suburban locations). For instance, if users walk into the geo-fenced perimeter of a store, restaurant, or retail shop, they will receive ads from businesses.
Fan Aquisition
involves using any of a variety of means, from display ads to News Feed and page pop-ups, to attract people to your Facebook page, Twitter feed, or other platform like a web page. It's getting your brand "out there" in the stream of social messages. Display ads on social sites have a social dimension (sometimes called "display ads with social features" or simply "social ads"). Social ads encourage visitors to interact and do something social, such as participate in a contest, obtain a coupon, or obtain free services for attracting friends.
Amplification
involves using the inherent strength of social networks. on Facebook, the average user has 120 "friends". This includes all people they have ever friended, including people whom they dont really know (and who dont really know them). Facebook users typically have only three to four close friends with whom they discuss confidential matters, and a larger set of around 20 friends with whom they have two-way communications (mutual friends). Let's use 20 as a reasonable number of mutual friends for marketing purposes. For marketers, this means that if they can attract on fan and encourage that fan to share his or her approval with his or her friends, the message can be amplified twenty times: 20 friends of the one can be influenced. Best of all: the friends of the fans are free. Marketers pay to attract only the initial fan and they are not charged by social sites (currently) for the amplification that can result.
Business Plan
is a document that describes a firm's business model. A business plan always takes into account the competitive environment.
CRM System
is a repository of customer information that records all of the contacts that a customer has with a firm (including websites) and generates a customer profile available to everyone in the firm with a need to "know the customer" CRM systems also supply the analytical software required to analyze and use customer information. Customers come to firms not just over the Web but also through telephone call centers, customer service representatives, sales representatives, automated voice response systems, ATMs and kiosks, in-store point-of-sale terminals, and mobile devices (m-commerce). Collectively, these are referred to as "customer touchpoints D." In the past, firms generally did not maintain a single repository of customer information, but instead were organized along product lines, with each product line maintaining a customer list (and often not sharing it with others in the same firm).In general, firms did not know who their customers were, how profitable they were, or how they responded to marketing campaigns. For instance, a bank customer might see a television advertisement for a low-cost auto loan that included an 800-number to call. However, if the customer came to the bank's website instead, rather than calling the 800-number marketers would have no idea how effective the television campaign was because this web customer contact data was not related to the 800-number call center data Figure 6.9 E illustrates how a CRM system integrates customer contact data into a single system. This is an example of a CRM system. The system captures customer information from all customer touchpoints as well as other data sources, merges the data, and aggregates it into a single customer data repository or data warehouse where it can be used to provide better service as well as to construct customer profiles for marketing purposes. Online analytical processing (OLAP) allows managers to dynamically analyze customer activities to spot trends or problems involving customers. Other analytical software programs analyze aggregate customer behavior to identify profitable and unprofitable customers as well as customer activities. CRMs are part of the evolution of firms toward a customer-centric and marketing-segment-based business, and away from a product-line-centered business. RMs are essentially a database technology with extraordinary capabilities for addressing the needs of each customer and differentiating the product or service on the basis of treating each customer as a unique person. Customer profiles can contain the following information:• A map of the customer's relationship with the institution• Product and usage summary data• Demographic and psychographic data• Profitability measures• Contact history summarizing the customer's contacts with the institution across most delivery channels• Marketing and sales information containing programs received by the customer and the customer's responses• E-mail campaign responses• Website visits• Mobile app downloads. With these profiles, CRMs can be used to sell additional products and services, develop new products, increase product utilization, reduce marketing costs, identify and retain profitable customers, optimize service delivery costs, retain high lifetime value customers, enable personal communications, improve customer loyalty, and increase product profitability. The goal is what is known as a "360-degree" view that enables a company to know what its customers buy how they browse, what kinds of communications and offers will engage them, and more. Leading CRM vendors include Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Sales-force, and SugarCRM, many of which offer cloud-based versions of their CRM products. One issue facing cloud RM providers and global companies that use those products is European Union data regulations that will require them to reassess how they use CRM data in order to avoid violating those regulations. All the major vendors offer cloud-based SaaS CM applications.
Click-Through Rate
measures the percentage of people exposed to an online advertisement who actually click on the advertisement
Bundling
offers consumers two or more goods for a price that is less than the goods would cost when purchased individually. The key idea behind the concept of bundling is that although consumers typically have very diverse ideas about the value of a single product, they tend to agree much more on the value of a bundle of products offered at a fixed price. In fact, the per-product price people are willing to pay for the bundle is often higher than when the products are sold separately. Bundling reduces the variance in market demand for goods.
Desktop Marketing
primarily focused with browser-based search and display ads, and email marketing
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
requires financial institutions to inform consumers of their privacy policies and permits consumers some control over their records
Social Density
refers to the number of interactions among members of a group and reflects the "connectedness" of a group, even if these connections are forced on users. For instance, some natural groups of people are not very "social" and few messages flowing among members. Other natural groups are loquacious and chatty with many messages flowing among members. The scope, intensity, and depth of Facebook's repository of personal information and rich social network present extraordinary marketing opportunities.
Price Discrimination
selling the same goods, or nearly the same goods, to different targeted groups at different prices. This only works if the firm can identify the price each individual would be willing to pay, and segregate the customers from one another so they cannot find out what the others are paying.
Widget
small chunks of code that execute automatically in your HTML web page. They are prebuilt and many are free. Social network sand blogs use them to present users with content drawn from them web such as calendars, clocks, weather, live tv, games, and other functionality. You can copy the code to an HTML web page.
Location-Based Services
targets marketing messages to users based on their location. Generally involves the marketing of location-based services. Examples of location-based services are personal navigation (How do I get there?), point-of-interest (What's that?), reviews (What's the best restaurant in the neighborhood?), friend finder (where are you? where's the crowd?), and family tracker services (where's my child?). There is a connection, of course: the more people use their mobile devices to search for and obtain local services, the more opportunities there are for marketers to target consumers with messages at just the right moment, at just the right location, and in just the right way - not too pushy and annoying, but in a way to improve the consumer experience at the moment of local shopping an buying. This the ideal in any event. Can take place on a desktop as well because browsers and marketers know your approximate location.
Mobile Commerce
the ability to purchase using a mobile device. communicating with or selling to consumers through wireless handheld devices such as cellular phones.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
the address used by a Web browser to identify the location of content on the Web, also uses a domain name as part of the URL. Contains the protocol to be used when accessing the address, followed by its location. For instance, the URL https://www.pearson.com refers to the IP address 159.182.41.80 with the domain name pearson.com and the protocol being used to access the address, HTTPS. Can have from two to four parts; for example name1.name2.name3.org.
Marginal Cost
the incremental cost of producing the next unit. A profit-maximizing company sets its prices so that the marginal revenue (the revenue the company receives from the next unit sold) from a product just equals its marginal costs. If a firm's marginal revenue is higher than its marginal costs, it would want to lower prices a bit and sell more products (why leave money on the table when you can sell a few more units?). If its marginal revenue for selling a product is lower than its marginal costs, then the company would want to reduce the volume a bit and charge a higher price (why lose money on each additional sale?)In the early years of e-commerce, sellers priced their products far below their marginal costs. The idea was to attract eyeballs with free goods and services, and then later, once the consumer was a part of a large, committed audience, charge advertisers enough money to make a profit, and charge customers subscription fees for value-added services (the so-called piggyback strategy in which a small number of user can be convinced to pay for premium services that are piggybacked upon a larger audience that receives standard or reduced-value services). To a large extent, social network sites and user-generated content sites have resurrected this revenue model with a focus on the growth in audience size and not short-term profits.
Dynamic Pricing
the price of the product varies, depending on the demand characteristics of the customer and the supply situation of the seller. - auctions - yield management (typically for perishable items, seasonal variations, and competitive/ fast changing/ clearly defined markets) is when managers set prices in different markets, appealing to different segments, in order to sell excess capacity - surge pricing is when prices increase during times of higher demand - flash marketing is effective for travel services, luxury clothing stores, and other goods and is when email or a dedicated website's features notify loyal customers (repeat purchasers), merchants offer goods and services for a limited time (usually hours) at very low prices.
Law of One Price
with complete price transparency in a perfect information marketplace, one world price for every product would emerge but it did not work as companies continued to compete amongst themselves using prices, features, scope of operations, and focus.
E-Commerce, 6 Major Types of E-Commerce
- Local e-commerce - Social e-commerce - Mobile e-commerce - Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce - Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce - Business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce
Principle of Responsibility
- a principle in the APA Ethics Code that calls for adhering to professional codes of conduct and not exploiting participants - as free moral agents, individuals, organizations, and societies responsible for the actions that they take
4 Layers of TCP/ICP
Application Layer - provides the definition of protocols for file, mail, and hypertext transfer. It also handles the encoding of data, controls the sessions, and defines socket services and other utilities over TCP/IP. The protocols in this layer include hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), secure shell (SSH), and network time protocol (NTP) Transport Layer - provides connection establishment and communication services. It also defines protocols for end-to-end transfer of data, along with error and flow controls. In the TCP/IP model, there are two transport layer protocols: TCP and UDP Internet Layer - defines the logical transmission of protocols for the whole network. The main protocols that live in this layer are the Internet Protocol (IP), internet control message protocol (ICMP), and address resolution protocol (ARP). Network Interface Layer -This layer establishes how data should be physically sent through the network, and includes physical devices such as cables and hardware.
Cloud Computing
is a model of computing in which computer processing, storage, software, and other services are provided as shared pool of virtualized resources over the internet. These "clouds" of computing resources can be accessed on as an-needed basis for any connected device and location
Client/Server Computing
is a model of computing in which client computers are connected in a network with one or more servers, which are computers that are dedicated to performing common functions that the client computers on the network need, such as file storage, software applications, printing, and internet access
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
describes the content in terms of what data is being described rather than how it's to be displayed. The tags used to describe and display data are defined by the user, whereas in HTML the tags are limited and predefined, and can also transform information into new formats, such as by importing information from a database and displaying it as a table. Information can be analyzed and displayed selectively, making it a more powerful alternative to HTML. On a elementary level it is extraordinarily easy to learn and is very similar to HTML except you can make up your own tags. On a deep level it has a rich syntax and an enormous set of software tools, which make it ideal for storing and communicating many types of data on the web.
Authenticity
refers to the ability to identify the identity of a person or entity with whom you are dealing on the internet. Someone who claims to be someone he is not is "spoofing" or misrepresenting himself
E-commerce Security (6 Dimensions)
- integrity - nonrepudiation - authenticity - confidentiality - privacy - availability
Internet2
A new, faster telecommunications network that deploys advanced network applications such as remote medical diagnosis, digital libraries, distance education, online simulation, and virtual laboratories. The Internet2 Abilene highspeed network is upgraded to 10 Gbps. A major milestone toward the development of ultra high speed transcontinental networks several times faster than the existing backbone is achieved.
Sales Revenue Model
companies derive revenue by selling goods, content, or services to customers. Companies such as Amazon, L.L.Bean, and Gap all have sales revenue models. A number of companies are also using a subscription-based sales revenue model. Birchbox, which offers home delivery of beauty products for a $10 monthly or $110 annual subscription price, is one example. Dollar Shave Club, which sells razor blades by subscription and was acquired by Unilever for $1 billion, is another. See the case study at the end of the chapter for a further look at Dollar Shave Club.
Affiliate Revenue Model
companies that steer business to an "affiliate" receive a referral fee or percentage of the revenue from any resulting sales. For example, MyPoints makes money by connecting companies with potential customers by offering special deals to its members. When they take advantage of an offer and make a purchase, members earn "points" they can redeem for freebies, and MyPoints receives a fee. Community feedback companies typically receive some of their revenue from steering potential customers to websites where they make a purchase.
Sponsored Community Sites
online communities created by government, nonprofit, or for-profit organizations for the purpose of pursuing organizational goals. These goals can be diverse, from increasing the information available to citizens; for instance, such as West-chestergov.com, the website for Westchester County (New York) government ; to an online auction such as eBay; to Tide.com, which focuses on uses of Tide detergent and is sponsored by its manufacturer (Procter & Gamble). Cisco, IBM, HP, and hundreds of other companies have developed their internal corporate social networks as a way of sharing knowledge.
Copyright
protects original forms of expression such as writings (books, periodicals, lecture notes), art, drawings, photographs, music, motion pictures, performances, and computer programs from being copied by others for a period of time. Up until 1998, the copyright law protected works of individuals for their lifetime plus 50 years beyond their life, and works created for hire and owned by corporations for 75 years after initial creation. Copyright does not protect ideas - just their expression in a tangible medium such as paper, cassette tape, or handwritten notes. Extended in 1998 for 20 years to 95 years for corporate owned works and life plus 70 years for works created by individuals.
Interest-Based Social Network
Offer members focused discussion groups based on a shared interest some specific subject, such as business careers, boats, horses, health, skiing, and thousands of other topics. Because the audience for interest communities is necessarily much smaller and more targeted, these communities have usually relied on advertising and tenancy/ sponsorship deals. Social networks such as College confidential (college admissions), Ravelry (knitting and crocheting), Sailing Academy (sailing), and Chronicle Forums (horse enthusiast) all are examples of social networks that attract people who share a common pursuit. Job markets and forums such as LinkedIn can be considered interest-based social networks as well.
Affinity Community
Offer members focused discussions and interaction with other people who share the same affinity . "Affinity" refers to self- and group identification. For instance, people can self identify themselves on the basis of religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political beliefs, geographical orientation, and hundreds of other categories. These social networks are supported by advertising along with revenue from sales of products.
Cybersquatting
Involves the registration of an infringing domain name, or other internet use of an existing trademark, for the purpose of extorting payments from the legitimate owners. Using the bad faith domain to divert web traffic to the bad faith domain that could harm the goodwill represented by the trademark, create market confusion, or tarnish or disparage the mark.
Public Key Encryption (Asymmetric encryption)
In 1976, a new way of encrypting messages was invented by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. In this method, two mathematically related digital keys are used: a public key and a private key. The private key is kept secret by the owner, and the public key is widely disseminated. Both keys can be used to encrypt and decrypt a message. However, once the keys are used to encrypt a message, the same key cannot be used to unencrypt the message. The mathematical algorithms used to produce the keys are one-way functions. A one-way irreversible mathematical function is one in which, once the algorithm is applied, the input cannot be subsequently derived from the output. The keys are sufficiently long (128, 256, and 512 bits) that it would take enormous computing power to derive one key from the other rising the largest and fastest computers available. Once encrypted using the public key, the message cannot be reverse-engineered or unencrypted using the same public key. The encrypted message is broken into packets and sent through several different pathways, making an interception of the entire message difficult. The only person who can decrypt the message is the person who has possession of the recipient's private key.
Choice/ Consent
There must be a process in place allowing consumers to choose how their information will be used for secondary purposes other than supporting the transaction, including internal use and transfer to third parties. Opt-in/Opt-out must be available.
Ethical Principles
Universalism Slippery Slope Collective Utilitarian No Free Lunch
Digital Divide
Up until 2000, single, white, young, college educated males with high incomes dominated the Internet. This inequality in access and usage led to concerns about a possible "digital divide". However, in recent years, there has been a marked increase in internet usage by females, minorities, seniors, and families with modest incomes, resulting in a notable decrease-but not elimination- in the earlier inequality of access and usage. A roughly equal percentage of men (85.7%) and women (84.2%) use the internet today. Young adults (18-24) from the age group with the highest percentage of internet use, at over 98% followed closely by teens(12-17) at 97%. Adults in the 25-54 group are also strongly represented, with percentages of over 90%. Another fast growing group online is the 65 and over segment, about 68% of whom now use the internet. The percentage of very young children (0-11) online has also spurted, to about 67% of that age group. Future internet user growth in the united states will come predominantly from those aged 65 and older and from children in the 0-11 age bracket. Vacation across racial and ethnic groups is not as wide as across age groups. were significant differences among such groups in the United States, but since has receded. In 2018, 89% of whites used the Internet, compared to 88% of Hispanics, and 87% of blacks. About 98% of households with income levels above $75,000 used the Internet, compared to only 81% of households earning less than $30,000. Over time income differences have declined but they remain significant with over a 15% gap between the highest category of household income and the lowest. Amount of educational so makes a significant difference when it comes to Internet usage. Of those individuals with less than a high school education, only 65% went online in 2018, compared to 97%of individuals with a college degree or more. Even some college education boosted Internet usage, with that segment reaching 93% (Pew Research Center, 2018b).Overall, the so-called "digital divide" has indeed moderated, but it still persists along income, education, age, and ethnic dimensions. Gender, income, education, age, and ethnicity also impact online behavior. According to the Pew Research Center, adults over the age of 65, those who have not completed high school, those who make less than$30,000 a year, and Hispanics are all less likely to purchase products online. Women are slightly more likely to purchase online than men, but not significantly so. With respect to online banking, the demographics are similar- those 65 and older are less likely than any age group to bank online, while those with at least some college are more likely than those with a high school diploma or less. Online banking is also more popular with men than women. No significant differences were found in terms of ethnicity (Pew ResearchCenter, 2012). Other commentators have observed that children of poorer and less educated families spend considerably more time using their access devices for entertainment (movies, games, Facebook, and texting) than do children from wealthier households. For all children and teenagers, the majority of time spent on the Internet listen labeled as "wasted time" because the majority of online use is for entertainment, and not education or learning.
Botnet
are collections of captured computers used for malicious activities such as sending spam, participating in a DDoS attack or credential stuffing campaign (malicious login attempts), stealing information from computers, and storing network traffic for later analysis. The number of botnets operating worldwide is not known but is estimated to be well into the thousands, controlling millions of computers. Bots and bot networks are an important threat to the internet and e-commerce because they can be used to launch very large-scale attacks using many different techniques. In 2011, federal marshals accompanied members of Microsoft's digital crimes unit in raids designed to disable the Rustock botnet, at that time the leading source of spam in the world with nearly 50,000 slave PCs under the control of its command and control servers located at six internet hosting services in the United States. Officials confiscated the Rustock control servers at the hosting sites, which claimed they had no idea what the Rustock servers were doing. The actual spam e-mails were sent by the slave PCs under the command of the Rustock servers. In 2013, Microsoft and the FBI engaged in another aggressive botnet operation, targeting 1,400 Zeus-derived Citadel botnets, which had been used in 2012 to raid bank accounts at major banks around the world, netting over $500 million. In 2015, an international cyber squad took down the Beebone botnet, made up of 12,000 computers that had been infecting about 30,000 computers a month around the world via drive-by downloads with Changeup, a polymorphic worm used to distribute trojan, worms, backdoors, and other types of malware. The FBI and British police were also able to stop a botnet that had stolen over $10 million from banks. As a result of efforts such as these, the number of bots has significantly declined, especially in the United States, although in 2017, there was an over 60% increase in overall botnet activity.
Local e-commerce
as its name suggests, is a form of e-commerce that is focused on engaging the consumer based on his or her current geographic location. Local merchants use a variety of online marketing techniques to drive consumers to their stores. Local e-commerce is the third prong of the mobile, social, local e-commerce wave and, fueled by an explosion of interest in local on-demand services such as Uber, is expected to grow in the United States to over $115 billion in 2018.
Subscription Revenue Model
company that offers content or services charges a subscription fee for access to some or all of its offerings. For instance, the digital version of Consumer Reports provides online and mobile access to premium content, such as detailed ratings, reviews, and recommendations, only to subscribers, who have a choice of paying a $6.95 monthly subscription fee or a $35.00 annual fee. Experience with the subscription revenue model indicates that to successfully overcome the disinclination of users to pay for content, the content offered must be perceived as a high-value-added, premium offering that is not readily available elsewhere nor easily replicated. Companies successfully offering content or services online on a subscription basis include Harmony (dating services), Ancestry (genealogy research), Microsoft's Xbox Live (video games), Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music (music), Scribd and Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program (e-books), and Netflix and Hulu (television and movies). See Table 2.1 for examples of various subscription services.
Revenue Model
describes how the firm will earn revenue, generate profits, and produce a superior return on invested capital. The function of the business organization is both to generate profits and to produce returns on investment capital that exceed alternative investments. Profits alone are not sufficient to make a company successful so a firm must produce returns greater than alternative investments. - Advertising revenue model - Subscription revenue model - Transaction revenue model - Sales revenue model - Affiliate revenue model
Patent
grants the owner a 20 year exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind the invention. Meant to ensure that inventors of new machines, devices, or industrial methods would receive the full financial and other rewards of their labor and still make widespread use of the invention possible by providing detailed diagrams for those wishing to use the idea under license from the patent's owner. Obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) which was created in 1812. Much more difficult and time consuming than receiving a copyright which is automatic with the creation of the work. Must be formally applied for and granted by Patent Office examiners who follow a set of rigorous rules. Patent protect the ideas themselves and not just the expression of ideas. Include man-made products, machines, compositions of matter, processing methods, as well as anything under the sun as long as it meets the other requirements of the Patent Act. Things that cannot be patented are laws of nature, natural phenomenon, and abstract ideas. The applicant must show that the invention is new, original, novel, nonobvious, and not evident in prior arts and practice.
Business-to-business (B2B)
in which businesses focus on selling to other businesses, is the largest form of e-commerce, with around $6.1 trillion in transactions in the United States in 2018 (see Figure 1.7 L). In 2018, there will be an estimated $13.2 trillion in business-to-business exchanges of all kinds, online and offline, suggesting that B2B e-commerce has significant growth potential. The ultimate size of B2B e-commerce is potentially huge. There are two primary business models used within the B2B arena: Net marketplaces, which include e-distributors, e-procurement companies, exchanges, and industry consortia, and private industrial networks. We review various B2B business models in Chapter 2 L and examine them in further depth in Chapter 12 D
Business-to-consumer (B2C)
in which online businesses attempt to reach individual consumers. B2C e-commerce includes purchases of retail goods, travel, financial, real estate, and other types of services, and online content. B2C has grown exponentially since 1995 and is the type of e-commerce that most consumers are likely to encounter. Within the B2C category, there are many different types of business models. has a detailed discussion of seven different B2C business models: online retailers, service providers, transaction brokers, content providers, community providers/social networks, market creators, and portals. Then, in Part 4 D, we look at each of these business models in action. In Chapter 9 L, we examine online retailers, service providers, including on-demand services, and transaction brokers. In Chapter 10 D, we focus on content providers. In Chapter 11 L, we look at community providers (social networks), market creators (auctions)and portals. The data suggests that, over the next five years, B2C e-commerce in the United States will continue to grow by over 10% annually. There is tremendous upside potential. Today, for instance, retail e-commerce (which currently comprises the majority of B2C e-commerce revenues) is still a very small part (around 10%) of the overall $5.27 trillion retail market in the United States. There is obviously much room to grow (see Figure 1.6 L). However, it's not likely that B2C e-commerce revenues will continue to expand forever at current rates. As online sales become a larger percentage of all sales, online sales growth will likely eventually decline. However, this point still appears to be a long way of Online content sales, everything from music, to video, games, and entertainment, have an even longer period to grow before they hit any ceiling effects.
Venture Capitalist Investors
invest in funds they manage for other investors such as investment banks, pension funds, insurance companies, or other businesses, and usually want to obtain a larger stake in the business and exercise more control over the operation of the business. Also typically want a well-defined exit strategy, such as a plan for an initial public offering or acquisition of the company by a more established business within a relatively short period of time that will enable them to obtain an adequate return on their investment. Ultimately means the founder and initial investor will no longer control the company at some point in the future.
Spoofing
involves attempting to hide a true identity by using someone else's e-mail or IP address. For instance, a spoofed e-mail will have a forged sender e-mail address designed to mislead the receiver about who sent the e-mail. IP spoofing involves the creation of TCP/IP packets that use someone else's source IP address, indicating that the packets are coming from a trusted host. Most current routers and firewalls can offer protection against IP spoofing. Spoofing a website sometimes involves pharming @, automatically redirecting a web link to an address different from the intended one, with the site masquerading as the intended destination. Links that are designed to lead to one site can be reset to send users to a totally unrelated site one that benefits the hacker. Although spoofing and pharming do not directly damage files or network servers, they threaten the integrity of a site. For example, if hackers redirect customers to a fake website that looks almost exactly like the true site, they can then collect and process orders, effectively stealing business from the true site. Or, if the intent is to disrupt rather than steal, hackers can alter orders inflating them or changing products ordered and then send them on to the true site for processing and delivery. Customers become dissatisfied with the improper order shipment, and the company may have huge inventory fluctuations that impact its operations. In addition to threatening integrity, spoofing also threatens authenticity by making it difficult to discern the true sender of a message. Clever hackers can make it almost impossible to distinguish between a true and a fake identity or web address.
Liability
is a feature of political systems in which a body of law is in place that permits individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations
Packet Switching
is a method of slicing digital messages into parcels called packets, sending the packets along different communication paths as they become available, and then reassembling the packets once they arrive at their destinations.
Business Model
is a set of planned activities (sometimes referred to as business processes designed to result in a profit in a marketplace. A business model is not always the same as a business strategy, although in some cases they are very close insofar as the business model explicitly takes into account the competitive environment. The business model is at the center of the business plan.
Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
is a set of standards for communication between a browser and a program running on a server that allows for interaction between the user and the server. Permits and executable program to access all the information within incoming requests from clients. The program can generate all the output required to make up the return page and send it back to the client via the web server. Can be written in nearly any programming language as long as they conform to the standards. Perl is the most popular language and the server that is generally used is Unix. Not highly scalable because a new process must be created for each request, thereby limiting the number of concurrent request that can be handled. Best for small to medium sized applications that do not have a high volume of user traffic. Also faces security issues.
Cookie
is a small text file that websites place on the hard disk of visitors' client computers every time they visit, and during the visit, as specific pages are visited. Allow a website to store data on a user's computer and then later retrieve it. Typically includes a name, a unique ID number for each visitor that is stored on the user's computer, the domain (which specifies the web server/domain that can access the cookie), a path (if a cookie comes from a particular part of a website instead of the main page, a path will be given), a security setting that provides whether the cookie can only be transmitted by a secure server, and an expiration date (not required). First party cookies come from the same domain name as the page the user is visiting, while third-party cookies come from another domain, such as ad serving or adware companies, affiliate marketers, or spyware servers. On some websites, there are literally hundreds of tracking files on the main pages. Provides web marketers with a very quick means of identifying the customer and understanding his or her behavior at the site. Websites use cookies to determine how many people visiting the site, whether they are new or rpeat visitors, and how often they have visited, although this data may be somewhat inaccurate because people share computers, they often use more than one computer, and cookies may have been inadvertently or intentionally erased. Cookies make shopping carts and "quick checkout" options possible by allowing a site to keep track of a user as he or she adds to the shopping cart. Each item added to the shopping cart is stored in the site's database along with the visitor's unique ID value. Ordinary cookies ae easy to spot using your browser, but Flash cookies, beacons, and tracking codes are not easily visible. All common browsers allow users to see the cookies placed in their cookies file. Users can delete cookies, or adjust their settings so that third-party cookies are blocked, while first-party cookies are allowed. With growing privacy concerns, over time the percentage of people deleting cookies has risen. The more cookies are deleted, the less accurate are web page and ad server metrics, and the less likely marketers will be able to understand who is visiting their sites or where they came from. As a result, advertisers have sought other methods. One way is using Adobe Flash software, which creates its own cookies files, known as Flash cookies. Flash cookies can be set to never expire, and can store about 5 MB of information compared to the 1,02 bytes stored by regular cookies. Although cookies are site-specific ( website can only receive the data it has stored on a client computer and cannot look at any other cookie), when combined with web beacons (also called "bugs", "clear GIFs," or "pixel tag"), they can be used to create cross-site profiles. Web beacons are tiny (1-pixel) graphic files embedded in email messages and on websites. Web beacons are used to automatically transmit information about the user and the page being viewed to a monitoring server in order to collect personal browsing behavior and other personal information. For instance, when a recipient opens an email in HTML format or opens a web page, a message is sent to a server calling for graphic information. This tells the marketer that the email was opened, indicating that the recipient was at least interested in the subject header. Web beacons are not visible to other users. They are often clear or colored white so they are not visible to the recipient. You may by able to determine if a web page is using web beacons by using the view source option of your browser and examining the IMG (image) tags on the page. As noted above, web beacons are typically one pixel in size and contain the URL of a server that differs from the one that served the page itself. Using cookies on mobile devices has been les effective. Regular cookies on the mobile Web are reset every time a user closes his or her mobile browser and in-app cookies can't be shard between apps, making both of limited utility. However, with the increasing numbers of people using mobile devices to access the internet, it is not surprising that telecommunications companies have begun to use tracking files. In late 2014, it was revealed that Verizon Wireless and AT&T were inserting a tracking header called a Unique Identifier Header (UIDH) into HTTP requests issued to websites from mobile devices, enabling them to track the online activities of their subscribers. Commentators call these tracking headers zombie cookies, perma-cookies, or super cookies because they cannot be deleted the way that regular browser cookies can. Following the outcry by privacy advocates and an FCC investigation, AT&T reportedly stopped using super cookies, and in 2016, Verizon settled with the FCC, agreeing to pay a $1.35 million fine, and to obtain customer permission before sharing tracking data with other companies and even with other parts of Verizon, including sites owned by AOL. In addition, Verizon agreed to inform customers about its ad targeting practices in the first instance. The FCC also is considering whether to outlaw the use of super cookies entirely.
The Web
is an information system that runs on the internet infrastructure. The web was the original "killer app) that made the internet commercially interesting and extraordinary popular. The web was developed in the early 1990s and hence is of much more recent vintage the the internet. We describe the Web in some detail in Chapter 3 D. The Web provides access to billions of web pages indexed by Google and other search engines. These pages are created in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML pages can contain text, graphics, animations, and other objects. The Internet prior to the Web was primarily used for text communications, file transfers, and remote computing. The Web introduced far more powerful capabilities of direct relevance to commerce. In essence, the Web added color, voice, and video to the Internet, creating a communications infrastructure and information storage system that rivals television, radio, magazines, and libraries There is no precise measurement of the number of web pages in existence, in part because today's search engines index only a portion of the known universe of web pages. Google has identified over 130 trillion individual web pages, up from 30 trillion in 2013, although many of these pages do not necessarily contain unique content(Schwartz, 2016). In addition to this "surface" or "visible" Web, there is also the so-called deep Web that is reportedly 500 to 1,000 times greater than the surface Web. The deep Web contains databases and other content that is not routinely identified by search engines such as Google (see Figure 1.2 L). Although the total size of the Web is not known, what is indisputable is that web content has grown exponentially since 1993.
Cold Fusion
is an integrated server-side environment for developing interactive web and mobile applications. Originally developed by Macromedia and now offered by Adobe, ColdFusion combines an intuitive tag-based scripting language and a tag-based server scripting language (CFML) that lowers the cost of creating interactive features. ColdFusion offers a powerful set of visual design, programming, debugging, and deployment tools. The most recent version of ColdFusion, released in 2016, provides enhanced ability to create mobile apps, as well as a number of new security features and programming language enchantments, and increased support for interoperability.
Hadoop
is an open source software framework managed by the Apache Software Foundation that enables distributed parallel processing of huge amounts of data across inexpensive computers. It breaks a big data problem down into subproblems, distributes them among up to thousands of inexpensive computer processing nodes, and then combines the result in to a smaller data set that is easier to analyze. You've probably used Hadoop to find the best airfare on the Internet, get directions to a restaurant, search on Google, or connect with a friend on Facebook Hadoop can process large quantities of any kind of Java, including structured transactional data, loosely structured data such as Facebook and Twitter feeds, complex data such as web server logfiles, and unstructured audio and video data. Hadoop runs on a cluster of inexpensive servers, and processors can be added or removed as needed. Companies use Hadoop to analyze very large volumes of data as well as for a staging area for unstructured and semi-structured data before it is loaded into a data warehouse. Twitter's Hadoop clusters, which host more than 300 petabytes of data(30.000 times more information than in the Library of Congress) across tens of thousands of servers are at the core of its data platform (Agarawal, 2018). Facebook also stores over 300 petabytes of data on Hadoop clusters. Yahoo uses Hadoop to track user behavior so it can modify its home page to fit user interests. Life sciences research firm NextBio uses Hadoop and HBase to process data for pharmaceutical companies conducting genomic research. Top database vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Microsoft have their own Hadoop software distributions. Other vendors offer tools for moving data into and out of Hadoop or for analyzing data within Hadoop. In addition, there are many new tools being developed for big data analysis in addition to Hadoop. One example is Spark, an open source product being supported by IBM that can deliver results faster than Hadoop.
Phishing Attack
is any deceptive, online attempt by a third party to obtain confidential information for financial gain. Typically do not involve malicious code but instead relies on straightforward misrepresentation and fraud, so-called, "social engineering" techniques. One of the most popular phishing attacks is the e-mail scam letter. The scam begins with an e-mail: a rich former oil minister of Nigeria is seeking a bank account to stash millions of dollars for a short period of time and requests your bank account number where the money can be deposited. In return, you will receive a million dollars. This type of email scam is popularly known as a "Nigerian letter" scam. Thousands of other phishing attacks use other scams, some pretending to be eBay, PayPal, or Citibank writing to you for account verification (known as spear phishing, or targeting a known customer of a specific bank or other type of business). Click on a link in the e-mail and you will be taken to a website controlled by the scammer, and prompted to enter confidential information about your accounts, such as your account number and PIN codes. On any given day, millions of these phishing attack e-mails are sent, and, unfortunately, some people are fooled and disclose their personal account information Phishers rely on traditional "con man" tactics, but use e-mail or other forms of online communication, such as social media or SMS messaging, to trick recipients into voluntarily giving up financial access codes, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and other personal information. Often, phishers create (or "spoof") a website that purports to be a legitimate institution and cons users into entering financial information, or the site downloads malware such as a keylogger to the victim's computer. For instance, a 2018 report found that the number of fake retail website designed to phish for customer information rose by almost 300% from the third quarter of 2017 to the third quarter of 2018 (Zhou, 2018). Phishers use the information they gather to commit fraudulent acts such as charging items to your credit cards or withdrawing funds from your bank account, or in other ways "steal your identity" (identity fraud). Symantec reported that in2017, about 1 in every 2,995 e-mails contained a phishing attack, a slight decrease in the rate compared to 2016. Although more and more people are becoming alert to the dangers of phishing, Verizon found that on average, 4% of people in any given phishing campaign will still click on it (Symantec, 2018; Verizon, 2018). However, certain types of phishing, such as BEC phishing and spear phishing, continue to grow. In perhaps one of the most notorious examples of spear phishing, e-mails that appeared to be legitimate Gmail password account reset requests enabled hackers to gain access to the Gmail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, as well as a number of other members of the Democratic National Committee, during the 2016 election (Symantec, 2018.2017). To combat phishing, in 2012, leading e-mail service providers, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, as well as financial services companies such as PayPal, Bank of America, and others, joined together to form DMARC.org, an organization aimed at dramatically reducing e-mail address spoofing, in which attackers use real e-mail addresses to send phishing e-mails to victims who may be deceived because the e-mail appears to originate from a source the receiver trusts. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) offers a method of authenticating the origin of the e-mail and allows receivers to quarantine, report, or reject messages that fail to pass its test. Yahoo and AOL have reported significant success against email fraud as a result of using DMARC, and in 2016Google joined them in implementing a stricter version of DMARC, in which e-mail that fails DMARC authentication checks will be rejected. As of November 2018, over three-quarter of all federal domains use DMARC, and over 50% of Fortune 500 companies, up from just one-third in 2017 (Whittaker, 2018).
Social e-commerce
is e-commerce that is enabled by social networks and online socialrelationships. Social e-commerce is often intertwined with m-commerce, particularly as more and more social network users access those networks via mobile devices. The growth of social e-commerce is being driven by a number of factors, including the increasing popularity of social sign-on (signing onto websites using your Facebook or other social network ID), network notification (the sharing of approval or disapproval of products, services, and content), online collaborative shopping tools, social search (recommendations from online trusted friends), and the increasing prevalence of integrated social commerce tools such as Buy buttons, Shopping tabs, marketplace groups, and virtual shops on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and other social networks. Social e-commerce is still in its relative infancy, but with social media and networks playing an increasingly important role in influencing purchase decisions and driving sales, it is continuing to grow. With the top 500 retailers reportedly generating $6.5 billion from social commerce in 2017, total revenues from social commerce in 2018 are likely to top $10 billion
Value Chain
is the set of activities performed in an industry or in a firm that transforms raw inputs into final products and services. Each of these activities adds economic value to the final product: hence. the term value chain as an interconnected set of value-adding activities. Figure 2.4 L illustrates the six generic players in an industry value chain: suppliers, manufacturers, transporters, distributors retailers, and customers. By reducing the cost of information, e-commerce offers each of the key players in an industry value chain new opportunities to maximize their positions by lowering costs and/or raising prices. For instance, manufacturers can reduce the costs they pay for goods by developing Internet-based B2B exchanges with their suppliers. Manufacturers can develop direct relationships with their customers, bypassing the costs of distributors and retailers. Distributors can develop highly efficient inventory management systems to reduce their costs, and retailers can develop highly efficient customer relation ship management systems to strengthen their service to customers. Customers in turn can search for the best quality, fastest delivery, and lowest prices, thereby lowering their transaction costs and reducing prices they pay for final goods. Finally, the operational efficiency of the entire industry can increase, lowering prices and - adding value for consumers, and helping the industry to compete with alternative industries.
Java Server Pages (JSP)
like CGI and ASP, a Web page coding standard that allows developers to use a combination of HTML, JSP scripts, and Java to dynamically generate Web pages in response to user requests. Uses Java "servlets", small Java programs that are specified in the web page and run on the web server to modify the web page before it is sent to the user who requested it. Is supported by most of the popular application servers today.
Internet Auction Benefits
liquidity - sellers can find willing buyers, and buyers can find sellers. Sellers and buyers can be located anywhere around the globe. Just as important, buyers and sellers can find a global market for rare items that would not have existed. price discovery - buyers and sellers can quickly and efficiently develop prices for items that are difficult to assess, where the price depends on demand and supply, and where the product is rare price transparency - public internet auctions allow everyone in the world to see the asking and bidding prices for items market efficiency - auctions can, and often do, lead to reduced prices, and hence reduced profits for merchants, leading to an increase in consumer welfare-one measure of market efficiency lower transaction costs - online auctions can lower the cost of selling and purchasing products, benefiting both merchants and consumers. Like other internet markets, such as retail markets, internet auctions have very low (but not zero) transaction costs consumer aggregation - sellers benefit from large online auctions' ability to aggregate a large number of consumers who are motivated to purchase something in one marketspace network affects - the larger an online auction becomes in terms of visitors and products for sale, the more valuable it becomes as a marketplace for everyone by providing liquidity and several other benefits listed previously, such as lower transaction costs, higher efficiency, and better price transparency
Network Effects
occurs where all participants receive value from the fact that everyone else uses the same tool or product (for example, a common operating system, telephone system, or software application such as a proprietary instant messaging standard or an operating system such as Windows), all of which increase in value as more people adopt them. To initiate this process, entrepreneurs argued that prices would have to be very low to attract customers and fend off potential competitors. E-commerce was, after all, a totally new way of shopping that would have to offer some immediate cost benefits to consumers. However, because doing business on the Web was supposedly so much more efficient when compared to traditional "bricks-and-mortar" businesses (even when compared to the direct mail catalog business) and because the costs of customer acquisition and retention would supposedly be so much lower, profits would inevitably materialize out of these efficiencies. Given these dynamics, market share, the number of online visitors ("eyeballs"), and gross revenue became far more important in the earlier stages of an online firm than earnings or profits. Entrepreneurs and their financial backers in the early years of e-commerce expected that extraordinary profitability would come, but only after several years of losses. Thus, the early years of e-commerce were driven largely by visions of profiting from new technology, with the emphasis on quickly achieving very high market visibility. The source of financing was venture capital funds. The ideology of the period emphasized the ungoverned "Wild West" character of the Web and the feeling that governments and courts could not possibly limit or regulate the Internet; there was a general belief that traditional corporations were too slow and bureaucratic, too stuck in the old ways of doing business, to "get it to be competitive in e-commerce. Young entrepreneurs were therefore the driving force behind e-commerce, backed by huge amounts of money invested by venture capitalists. The emphasis was on disrupting (destroying) traditional distribution channels and disintermediating existing channels, using new pure online companies who aimed to achieve impregnable first-mover advantages. Overall, this period of e-commerce was characterized by experimentation, capitalization, and hyper competition.
E-Commerce Server Suite
offers an integrated environment that promises to provide most or all of the functionality and capabilities you will need to develop a sophisticated, customer-centric site. It has a built in shopping cart that can display merchandise, manage orders, and clear credit card transactions. There are three types which include a predesigned starter with customization of the look and feel with a standard set of functionalities, open source software, and high end software as a service which is hosted in the cloud and run by the client.
Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)
provides a way for consumers to sell to each other, with the help of an online market maker (also called a platform provider). In C2Ce-commerce, the consumer prepares the product for market, places the product for auction or sale, and relies on the market maker to provide catalog, search engine, and transaction- clearing capabilities so that products can be easily displayed, discovered, and paid for. eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy were the original C2C platform provider pioneers, but today they face significant competition. For instance, third-party sales on Amazon have skyrocketed. Facebook has also entered the arena with Facebook Marketplace. There are also a number of new entrants focused on the C2C market, such as Letgo, Offerup, Posh-mark, ThredUp, and Kidizen. On-demand service companies such as Uber and Airbnb can also be considered as C2C platform providers. Although there are no officially reported statistics on the size of the U.S. C2C market, it is probably safe to estimate its size in 2018 as more than $100 billion (not including on-demand services).
Mobile Platform
provides the ability to access the Internet from a variety of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers via wireless networks or cell phone service. Mobile devices are playing an increasingly prominent role in Internet access. In 2018, over 91% of Americans who access the Internet use a mobile device to do so at least some of the time (Marketer, Inc., 2018a). Figure 1.3 D illustrates the variety of devices used by Americans to access the Internet in 2018. The mobile platform is not just a hardware phenomenon. The introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007, followed by the Apple iPad in2010, has also ushered in a sea-change in the way people interact with the Internet from a software perspective. In the early years of e-commerce, the Web and web browsers were the only game in town. Today, in contrast, more Americans access the Internet via a mobile app on a mobile device than by using a desktop computer and web browser.
Firewall
refers to either hardware or software that filters communication packets and prevents some packets from entering the network based on a security policy. the firewall controls traffic to and from servers and clients, forbidding communications from untrustworthy sources, and allowing other communications from trusted sources to proceed. Every message that is to be sent or received from the network is processed by the firewall, which determines if the message meets security guidelines established by the business. If it does, it is permitted to be distributed, and if it doesn't, the message is blocked. Firewalls can filter traffic based on packet attributes such as source IP addresses, destination port IP addresses, type of service (such as WW or HTTP), the domain name of the source, and many other dimensions. Most hardware firewalls that protect local area networks connected to the internet have default settings that require little if any administrator intervention and employ simple but effective rules that deny incoming packets from connection that does not originate from internal request - the firewall only allows connections from servers that you requested service from. A common default setting on hardware firewalls (DSL and cable modem routers) simply ignores efforts to communicate with TCP port 445, the most commonly attacked port. the increasing use of firewalls by home and business internet users has greatly reduced the effectiveness of attacks, and forced hackers to focus more on e-mail attachments to distribute worms and viruses. There are two major methods firewalls use to validate traffic: packet filters and application gateways. Packet filters examine data packets to determine whether they are destined for a prohibited port or originate from a prohibited IP address (as specified by the security administrator). The filter specifically looks at the source and destination information, as well as the port and packet type, when determining whether the information may be transmitted. One downside of the packet filtering method is that it is susceptible to spoofing, because authentication is not one of its roles. Application gateways are a type of firewall that filters communications based on the application being requested, rather than the source or destination of the message. Such firewalls also process requests at the application level, farther away from the client computer than packet filters. By providing a central filtering point, application gateways provide greater security than packet filters but can compromise systems performance. Next generation firewalls use an application-centric approach to firewall control. They are able to identify applications regardless of the port, protocol, or security evasion tools used; identify users regardless of device or IP addresses; decrypt outbound SSL; and protect in real time against threats embedded in applications.
Privacy
refers to the ability to control the use of information a customer provides about themselves to an e-commerce merchant. E-commerce merchants must establish internal policies that govern their own use of customer information, and they must protect that information from illegitimate or unauthorized use.
Availability
refers to the ability to ensure that an e-commerce site continues to function
Nonrepudiation
refers to the ability to ensure that e-commerce participants do not deny (i.e., repudiate) their online actions. For instance, the availability of free e-mail accounts with alias names makes it easy for a person to post comments or send a message and perhaps later deny doing so. Even when a customer uses a real name and e-mail address, it is easy for that customer to order merchandise online and then later deny doing so. In most cases, because merchants typically do not obtain a physical copy of a signature, the credit card issuer will side with the customer because the merchant has no legally valid proof that the customer ordered the merchandise.
Integrity
refers to the ability to ensure that information being displayed on a website ,or transmitted or received over the internet, has not been altered in any way by an unauthorized party.
Confidentiality
refers to the ability to ensure that messages and data are available only to those who are authorized to view them
Mobile e-commerce (m-commerce)
refers to the use of mobile devices to enable online transactions. M-commerce involves the use of cellular and wireless networks to connectsmartphones and tablet computers to the Internet. Once connected, mobile consumers can purchase products and services, make travel reservations, use an expanding variety offinancial services, access online content, and much more. M-commerce purchases (both for retail and travel) are expected to reach almost $280 billion in 2018 and to grow rapidly in the United States over the next five years (see Figure 1.8 L). Factors that are driving the growth of m-commerce include the increasing amount of time consumers are spending using mobile devices, larger smartphone screen sizes, greater use of responsive design enabling websites to be better optimized for mobile use and mobile checkout and payment, and enhanced mobile search functionality A variation of m-commerce known as conversational commerce involves the use of chatbots on mobile messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Slack, and others as a vehicle for companies to engage with consumers.
HTTP
the internet protocol used to transfer web pages. Was developed by the world wide web consortium and the internet engineering task force (IETF). Runs in the application layer of the TCP/IP model. HTTP session begins when a clients browser requests a resource, such as a web page, from a remote internet server. when the server responds by sending the page requested, the HTTP session for that object ends. Because web pages may have many objects on them-graphics, sound, or video files, frames, and so forth-each object must be requested by a separate HTTP message.
Information Density
the total amount and quality of information available to all market participants, consumers and merchants alike. E-commerce technologies reduce information collection, storage, processing, and communication costs. At the same time, these technologies greatly increase the currency, accuracy, and timeliness of information--making information more useful and important than ever. As a result, information becomes more plentiful, less expensive, and of higher quality. A number of business consequences result from the growth in information density. One of the shifts that e-commerce is bringing about is a reduction in information asymmetry among market participants (consumers and merchants). Prices and costs become more transparent. Price transparency refers to the ease with which consumers can find out the variety of prices in a market; cost transparency refers to the ability of consumers to discover the actual costs merchants pay for products. Preventing consumers from learning about prices and costs becomes more difficult with e-commerce and, as a result, the entire marketplace potentially becomes more price competitive (Sinha, 2000). But there are advantages for merchants as well. Online merchants can discover much more about consumers; this allows merchants to segment the market into groups willing to pay different prices and permits them to engage in price discrimination--selling the same goods, or nearly the same goods, to different targeted groups at different prices. For instance, an online merchant can discover a consumer's avid interest in expensive exotic vacations, and then pitch expensive exotic vacation plans to that consumer at a premium price, knowing this person is willing to pay extra for such a vacation. At the same time, the online merchant can pitch the same vacation plan at a lower price to more price-sensitive consumers. Merchants also have enhanced abilities to differentiate their products in terms of cost, and quality.
Open Source Software
this can be considered if you have some programming background. Developed by a community of programmers and designers, and is free to use and modify. The advantage is that you get exactly what you want but it can take several months for a single programmer to develop the site and get all the tools to work together seamlessly.