A Example of Failure E-Commerce and its cause

Toysmart.com was owned by a Disney company that began advertising, promoting and selling toys online since January, 1999. In September, Toysmart became a licensee of TRUSTe , an organization that ensures the privacy policy of online businesses and displays its seal and trademark. It indicated the privacy policy that personal information is never shared with a third party would be safe when selling to customer.

However, Toysmart faced privacy issues. Toysmart decided that displaying the TRUST of trademark but did not give fully information to consumers. It sells customer information without providing former customers notice or giving them an opportunity to block the sale or use of their personal information. Therefore, the information would not remain secure and confidential. The Federal Trade Commission (FTG) sued Toysmart to block the sale of customer database that violated consumer protection laws and the privacy rights of customers.

Toysmart was faced with a difficult choice. As an online company, Toysmart did not have the same type of material assets that are most usually associated with bankrupt businesses. There were only few tangible assets such as warehouse full of toys to be sold to the highest bidder.

Instead, Toysmart was a faced with the reality that their assets lay in the information they had obtained from their customers. Based on these factors, Toysmart was faced with complex situation. They could either choose to abide by their promise to never share their customers’ personal information with third party and maintain their millions of dollars or worth of debt, or they could advertise to sell the customer information and have the possibility of lessening their debt.

It was found that toysmart.com had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) because it collected personal information from children under the age of 13 without requiring parent’s consent. This was in direct relation to the contests toysmart held on its website that children could enter by electronically sending their name and age. Finally, United States District Court of Massachusettes found that toysmart actions will injure customers through the United States by invading their privacy.

After Toysmart went bankrupt, under a settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, the customer database was destroyed. Toysmart plays in a role that they are not only acting in an unethical manner by selling customers’ personal information without their consent, but also shows the image of the company runs without regard for deceiving customers.

Related Link:

http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2001dltr0010.html

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/ci/31/i12/html/12legal.html

http://search2.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/PLPR/2001/1.html

A Example of Success E-Commerce and Its Cause

Online shopping brings a lot of convenience to the consumers. In Malaysia, more and more people start to purchase something online such as clothes, electronic products or even pets. Therefore you should not be strange about this E-Commerce company: Amazon.com, Inc.



Amazon.com, Inc was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and launched online in 1995. It started as an online bookstore but soon diversified to "Earth's Biggest Selection" of nearly everything today. It has 35 million customers and lists million of different items in categories. Furthermore, it has established separate websites in United Kingdom, France, China and Japan.

These are the following reasons that make it success:

Business Strategies
Amazon.com stands head and shoulders above others because it pursues cost-leadership, customer differentiation and focus strategies. Since Amazon hold less inventory than the traditional stores in the market, negotiate with wholesalers and is a virtual tax-free shopping zone, therefore it provides quality products to customers at a lower cost for a more reasonable and affordable price than its competitors.

The customer reviews concentrate on positive or negative comments that are directed at the product itself. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales will demonstrate the popularity and dependability of a product. Through the review, the Amazon.com can extensive customers profiles and know what product the customers searching always. They can recommend them once got new related topic published and other related suggestions.

The staffs are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in any way they feel fit. Furthermore, they hire local employees in foreign countries as they did in Germany and U.K. This is helped them gathering information about the local market and introduced more channels and branches of Amazon.com in these foreign countries to provide them a familiar look to this e-commerce company.

Customer Service
Amazon.com always focuses on its customers and it provides admirable customer service serves its customers by performing as promised, such as punctual delivery. In addition, the company is always offering “structured surprises” that give customers various rewards or discounts, in an effort to improve brand loyalty. It also provides users friendly interface with convenience and ease of use and help to maintain customer royalty. It provides easy search, customize option, e-mail confirmation and always add useful information related to product. Besides that, it also provides safe, convenient and reliable payment system to customer. Unlike e-bay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments and payment security are handled by Amazon itself. Customer will be kept informed of the transaction processing system; it also provides guarantees and adopting return policy.

Related Link:

www.wikipedia.com

http://www.emeraldinsight.com_Insight_ViewContentServlet_contentType=Article&Filename=_published_emeraldfulltextarticle_pdf_0010380701.pdf

http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/companyprofile/a/Amazon.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com

Google is changing the world

Nowadays there are many companies dealt with EC, but no any company other than Google has much affected our life and work. As we know, Google is a useful search engine and targeted advertising tools. As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page.

Google’s goal is to deliver technologies to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Therefore, everyone can obtain the information easily. To make simple for users to input and share data, Google is trying to reinvent the spreadsheet as a Web-based application because it is what most people use to organize. The program is designed to help people organize their own information and make it more easily accessible to others via the Web. Today, Google is researching the demand for Google Spreadsheet to work with Google Base, an online database service that allows Google users to post various types of information online. Besides that, many Web programs such as email, communication, and scheduling were provided by Google.

Enterprise search which identifies and enables specific content across the enterprise to be guided is another feature of Google. A crucial enterprise search issue is programming search engines to crawl through all the various data sources at a company and gather their contents. For instance, Oracle offers a search engine for enterprise system, such as ERP and CRM.

Kaiser Permanente is an organization which applies Google Search Appliance and it is the largest nonprofit health maintenance organization (HMO) in America. The amount of available medical knowledge has increased twice by every 7 years, so it is very important that updating the information in order to make sure HMO has provided good caregiving. The Google Search Appliance enables HMO to index more than 150000 documents across the network. Therefore, everyone can share the information around the World not only in US, doctors and nurses are also using Google search to obtain information which help them to diagnose and specify treatments, and also check for the effects by taking particular medication, they can consult clinical research studies when they face problem.

Source: Turban, E., King, D., McKay, J., Marshall, P., Lee, J., & Viehland, D. (2008). Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective 2008 (International Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Education International. www.prenhall.com/turban/

The History And Evolution of E-commerce

It is not surprising that E-commerce is the outcome of fast changes in the global nature of the technology. Electronic commerce called as e-commerce(EC) consists of the buying, selling, exchanging products or services ,or information via internet or others computer networks. It's one of the wonders of the technological world.Let us briefly glide through the historic events that took place which led to the evolution of E-Commerce.

To start with, in the year 1970s, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), was standardized to allow businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or invoices electronically. In 1992, online retail products were being provided to its customers by CompuServe. This great revolution bought the first chance ever for the people to purchase things through the computer, thus making the lifestyle of the people a lot easier and trendy. Netscape arrived in 1994 which was very user friendly and offered users the option of surfing the internet through a single browser. Also, it provided Secure Sockets Layer which was a safe online transaction technology.

So, from that day onwards, fun was away from just a click of the mouse. When the Internet became commercialized and popular worldwide around 1994, users and companies began offers their services through the World Wide Web. Then in 1995, the current biggest names in the E-Commerce industry which are eBay.com and Amazon.com were launched. It was a major factor for such an unprecedented growth of E-Commerce industry.

The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Internet which integrates the computer and telecommunication technology has revolutionized the way communication is carry on daily. The internet allows information to spin around the world at an ever faster rate in large quantities for cheap. The arrival of the internet revolution is indeed a good news to small businesses, and medium enterprises (SME). It brings equal opportunity to all firms to access to the international market.

E-commerce is the way of the future. E-commerce is an emerging industry following the same development the pattern that the automobile industry experienced 100 years ago, only faster. The sites like Amazon.com was honored as the earth’s largest book store resulting in more than 1.2 billion dollars sales in just 10 weeks of holiday season shopping alone with more than 3 million shoppers hooked to that site. Even online air ticketing industry is making more than 20 billion dollars every year. Thus, E-Commerce has really emerged as a huge industry over the past few years standing up to the expectations of many. Let us continue to see the success and failure of e-commerce.

Related link:
http://www.flysyk02.netfirms.com/Ecommerce/History.htm

http://www.ecommerce-land.com/history_ecommerce.html