E-Commerce 101: Understanding the Basics of Building and Managing an Online Business, Slides of Fundamentals of E-Commerce

Download E-Commerce 101: Understanding the Basics of Building and Managing an Online Business and more Slides Fundamentals of E-Commerce in PDF only on Docsity! Building & Managing Web Sites E-Commerce Concepts An Introduction Docsity.com Introduction • Internet-based e-commerce growing – sales estimates of $15-30 billion for 2001. • Some danger of overhype: – Total U.S. annual retail is $2.7 trillion. – Potentially over-inflated market capitalizations of e-commerce firms (Amazon lost $175 million last year). – Total market capitalizations of major e- commerce firms far exceeds possible profits. Docsity.com Terminology - II • Taxes – The money the government takes away from the economy used to ruin the lives of hard working, decent people. Companies can run afoul of these if they ship products from one jurisdiction to another or sell items directly. • Contraband – A product deemed illegal by a jurisdiction. Internet companies, can run afoul of these laws when they ship to customers in the jurisdiction. • Community Standards – The ability of communities to decide that a product or service is not desired in their community. See note on contraband. Docsity.com Shipping To assist your site in computing shipping (and to make you want to ship with them), the three major shippers provide integration kits to help you compute shipping costs and ship. • Federal Express: https://webapi.fedex.com/ • United Parcel Service: http://www.ec.ups.com/ecommerce/solutions/upsinttools.html • Post Office: http://www.uspsprioritymail.com/et_top.html Docsity.com Taxes • This is an icky area. The various countries, states, counties, cities, etc have all realized the missing opportunity to collect their slice of the Internet pie. • Sites should elicit expert tax advice (Various banks etc can help as part of their merchant services). • Taxware is the industry leader in providing sales tax computation and compliance. They offer an integrated system to compute the tax passed some parameters. http://www.taxware.com/ • Congress is considering a bill to extend the ban on Internet taxes another 5 years. Weigh in on this. Docsity.com Secure Sockets Layer • SSL (HTTPS) is the basis of secure exchange of sensitive e-commerce information. • SSL does end-to-end encryption of the HTTP stream using public key encryption by digital certificate. • Requirements: – Both browser and server must support HTTPS (3.x+) – Requires a digital certificate from “trusted” third party like Verisign (http://www.verisign.com). • Serious configuration and ongoing maintenance issues. • http://developer.netscape.com/tech/security/ssl/howitworks.html Docsity.com SSL RSA Security Model SSL v2, v3, TLS v1 Multiple configurable Certificate Authorities Automatic, end-configurable trust chaining ‘Server authentication, optional client authentication Certificate request creation X.509 certificate creation ‘and parsing Certificate caching, storage and retrieval Network Adaptation Multi-protoco! support Built in protocol handler RSA” DSA and Diffie-Hellman DES, 3DES, RC2*, RC4* MD2, MDS, SHA-1, HMAC ONT ey OST ed) party Aras aa aa Bron ta Cas HTTP, at Telnet, etc 1m A) A 7] Secure Pip TCP/IP Add trusted protocol security to your Internet applications quickly and easily RSA BSAFE SSL-C Functional Layers http://www.rsasecurity.com/products/bsafe/sslc.html Docsity.com Payment Processing • Some Popular Payment Processing Vendors – Authorize.net – Cybercash/IC Verify – iTransact – Merchant Online – Open Market • Of these, Cybercash is the most famous and one of the first ones. Docsity.com Some Principles for Web-Based E-Commerce • The principle challenge is to gain and hold the consumers attention via: – Directing potential customers to your site. – Interesting and engaging presentation – High-quality product information – Customized customer support Source: Webonomics: Nine essential principles for growing your business on the World Wide Web. Schwartz, Evan I. (New York: Broadway Books), 1997. Docsity.com E-Commerce Principles… • The quantity of visitors to your site is much less important than the quality of their experience… – Sales success comes from drawing visitors back to your site. – Customers expect the Web to be an interactive and personal medium – web retail evolving into a mass medium of niche marketing on a per-customer basis. – Must provide value-added services to retain loyalty. Docsity.com E-Commerce Principles… • Current mass media pushes information to customers – web visitors want to pull detailed information from your site. – Need to have this detailed product information. – Need to make it accessible. – Need to make it locatable in different ways – Need to have more information about it then they could get elsewhere. – Need to offer additional things of value to the shopper. Docsity.com E-Commerce Principles… • Consumers will shop online primarily for information-rich products. – Information rich products: books, CDs, software, big- ticket items like cars – Information-poor products: detergent, paper towels, etc. – Retail has been cutting back on knowledgeable customer service, opening a door for e-commerce. – Clever site offer 24/7 sophisticated customer service, something consumers can not get in the real world. – The software industry has been the most successful at this Docsity.com E-Commerce Principles… • Self-Service provides the highest level of customer comfort and satisfaction – Customers appreciate the control and choices they receive from well-implemented self-service systems. – BUT, person-to-person customer services won't go away, just focus on higher-level problems. – Online self-service must be efficient and user-friendly – lots of testing and constant refinement. Docsity.com E-Commerce Principles… • Customer Management – Make sure you know your primary customers. – Remember your customers from transaction to transaction. – Acknowledge and reward loyal customers. – Don't abuse your customers with spammed offers. – Have clear paths for customers to get help from you. – Retain loyal customers – they provide ongoing revenue, referrals, and will purchase more expensive products. Docsity.com