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E-business evolution
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The Fight for Survival of E-Commerce
Abstract: How can e-businesses be successful in the new millennia? This paper looks at both the industry-wide and individual company trends that are developing, from what it takes to remain competitive, to public assurance in security.
It hasn't been an easy year for e-commerce. With so many e-businesses failing, and just as many emerging, the key to survival has been the attraction and retention of customers. Different companies need different approaches, however, with one being the use of online coupons. At the same time, the industry is getting a better image as security is addressed - more specifically, the confidence of buying online with credit cards.
Creating and retaining a customer base on the Internet is not an easy task. Different companies need to have different approaches, depending on what their product is, and who their competitors are. To analyze these companies, we split them into type types - the niche competitor and the direct competitor.
The niche competitor is exactly what its name implies. These are the companies with a specific niche - their customer base comes from the fact that they offer a one-of-a-kind service. An example of this is the online auction site Ebay. Ebay provides a service that when first introduced, was non-existent on the Internet. Today, there is no other online auction site that even begins to rival Ebay in either its number of users and/or hits per day. Boasting over 10 million registered users as of December of 1999, Ebay had over 3 million items listed for sale in an excess of 3,000 categories that very same month [3]. PC Data Online, a service that rates websites by the amount of traffic received, placed Ebay 8th in their monthly Top 100. No other auction-oriented site appeared on the list [6]. For a niche competitor to be successful against similar niche competitors, however, it must offer both a good product and good advertisement. Ebay succeeded by saturating the market with advertisements early and quickly, and by providing an easy to use and attractive interface. Ebay's early competitors did not do so well - while Ebay advertised on television, most did not, and most auction sites simply did not look as good as Ebay's. Even today, Yahoo! Auctions pales in comparison to Ebay, aesthetically. Indeed, Ebay is both a well-tuned site and household name and thus has been able to fend off and retain customers from would-be competitors such as Yahoo! Auctions, and AuctioNet.
Jonathan Kozol's book, Amazing Grace, analyzes the lives of the people living in the dilapidated district of South Bronx, New York. Kozol spends time touring the streets with children, talking to parents, and discussing the appalling living conditions and safety concerns that plague the residents in the inner cities of New York. In great detail, he describes the harsh lifestyles that the poverty stricken families are forced into; day in and day out. Disease, hunger, crime, and drugs are of the few everyday problems that the people in Kozol's book face; however, many of these people continue to maintain a very religious and positive outlook on life. Jonathan Kozol's investigation on the lifestyle of these people, shows the side to poverty that most of the privileged class in America does not get to see. Kozol wishes to persuade the readers to sympathize with his book and consider the condition in which these people live. The inequality issues mentioned are major factors in affecting the main concerns of Kozol: educational problems, healthcare obstacles, and the everyday struggles of a South Bronx child.
The achievement ideology is an important concept in understanding the ways that the Hallway Hangers and Brothers experience social reproduction. The achievement ideology is the view that "success is based on merit, and economic inequality is due to differences in ambition and ability. Individuals do not inherit their social status; they attain it on their own" (3). The view is that if one works hard, one can easily attain social advancement. This is not the case, which some of the following theories can help explain when the Hallway Hangers and Brothers are more closely examined.
The philosopher Aristotle once wrote, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” This famous quote compels people to question the significance of their joy, and whether it truly represents purposeful lives they want to live. Ray Bradbury, a contemporary author, also tackles this question in his book, Fahrenheit 451, which deals heavily with society's view of happiness in the future. Through several main characters, Bradbury portrays the two branches of happiness: one as a lifeless path, heading nowhere, seeking no worry, while the other embraces pure human experience intertwined together to reveal truth and knowledge.
In two distinct e-commerce business types, Business-to-business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C), there are many differences in the way they operate. Specifically in marketing, differences include how the marketing is driven and the values of the strategies, the size of the target market and length of the sales cycle, and even the buying patterns of the target consumers. Each of these differences will be better defined and explained in the following paragraphs.
About 98.3% of all persons had used e-business services such as Octopus Card and Automatic Teller Machine (Census and Statistics Department, 2009). One of the pitfalls for the development of e-business, however, is the concerns on consumer privacy. According to Green’s (1999) survey, 54% of respondents had decided not to purchase a product because of a concern overuse of personal information collected in the e-business transaction. This essay examines the circumstances on protection of consumer privacy in e-business. As e-business is surging by an astronomical number and consumer information is a kind of property, the protection of consumer privacy in e-business becomes significant.
For anyone who wants to make money on the internet, discovering their niche is the first and most vital stride that they have to find out about. The niche is that area of the online commercial center that you ought to corner and concentrate all your internet moneymaking endeavors on. When you focus on a particular niche with laser-like exactness, you increase your chances of making money online, you make your work less demanding for you, and you likewise bring down your odds of getting worn out later on. With regards to choosing a product that will profit on the web, the most well-known mistake that many newbie internet marketers make is to pick a product to offer before they've done any genuine research into whether there's a business opportunity for it.
Socrates states to the jurors in his trail, “No evil can happen to a good man” (48). Socrates is examining the moral center of the man. Evil can occur to an individual from the outside. Socrates a good, even innocent, man was sentenced to death. Other characters in history and even today are identified as good, but they still have evil occur to them. Socrates is not talking about an outside evil or harm occurring to a good person. He is examining the soul and what is morally evil and morally good.
Ten years ago, the Internet as we know it hit screens. It was 1995 when Explorer and Netscape emerged as the leading browsers for Internet users. Of course, a lot has changed since the days when it took several minutes to load one Web page. Today, URLs are as common as phone numbers for most businesses.
Since its comet-like boom in the nineties the internet has attracted myriads of companies to do business on this boundaryless media. And the boom does not seem to stop. eCommerceis a catchword, which stands for a whole branch of new types of businesses that mushroomed up in the last couple of years. Retailers, all sorts of companies, even law offices are using the web for their daily business. There seems to be no comparable other way to develop and exploit global markets. The internet is more and more used as a fast, innovative and cost-saving tool to gain and serve customers where they feel most comfortable and relaxed, namely right in their office or at home (Jonscher, 1999, p.204). In the following there are just three examples of companies, which base a significant fraction of their business on the web.
Introduction and Background The computer service industry can be broken down into several categories ranging from reseller to consultant. Entré Computers / Executive Business Machines Inc. (EBM) was a sales and service organization for typewriters at its inception in 1972. However, as the corporate market shifted its needs from typewriters to word processors to personal computers, so did EBM change its product line to meet that demand. Now they are trying to compete in a very competitive low margin industry. They are a small single location company with annual gross revenues of twenty million (USD). However, as the profit margin and price of their product continually drop at a rate of forty percent annually, it becomes more difficult to show increasing gross revenues. They will need to find a place in the market, a niche, to survive and effectively compete with larger internationally known corporations as well as small local companies that are very much like their own. Industry Structure, Competitors The market is extremely competitive price-searchers market; product is often sold below manufacture's cost just to maintain market share and brand loyalty. It is a competitive price-searcher market because of the low barriers to entry and no regulations in price. Firms in this market are faced with a downward-sloping demand curve. The sellers range from international organizations, which retain over twenty thousand employees, to very small local shops with as few as two workers. The low-end of the market could be considered a Natural Monopoly because the average costs of production are continually decreasing as a result of higher production, improved technology and increased competition. However, there is a high end of market that would be deemed an Oligopoly, because it consists of a small number of sellers due to a very high barrier to entry. Typically the differentiated products are custom-built solutions that can only be provided by companies of the size and stature of a big six consulting firm or an internationally know organization such as Oracle or SAS. There are very high barriers to entry to compete in this market since the clients to this product are looking for large-scale international support. In order to implement a sophisticated differentiated product like Oracle financials or SAP, a company needs to retain an enormous overpaid staff of software engineers to develop, support, and implement such solutions. Very few companies are capable of retaining and / or attracting the staff necessary to provide such solutions.
Wu, Mahajan, and Balasubramanian (2003) conducted a study across the business sectors of telecommunications, computer hardware, semiconductors and manufacturing equipment to identify the effects of e-business and thus e-marketing adoption had on business performance.
Li, F 2007, What is E-business ?: how the Internet transforms organizations, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
The threat of new entrants is moderately strong. Incumbents do not strongly contest entry of newcomers, but existing industry members are consistently looking to expand their geographic reach and offer a broad product assortment. Brand awareness and customer loyalty are high and greatly important i this industry.
E-marketing is a fast growing and rapid platform for any form of business. EBay has been highly successful over recent years and this is a perfect example of an online business. The internal and external environments are constantly changing and in order to keep up with these changes, businesses and organisations must make relevant changes, and generate new strategies to keep up with contemporary developments in e-marketing and to also maintain their position in their market in comparison to their competitors.