Online Ethical, Legal, And Regulatory Issues In B2B Versus B2C

As internet use develops, both businesses and consumers are utilizing this opportunity to achieve their goals. Some of these goals include expanding into greater markets for businesses and shopping online for consumers. These online transactions now encompass much more than the traditional online banking. They represent the billions of merchants and consumers whom take part in online transactions twenty-four hours a day. With this, credit cards and online transactions are quickly becoming an important legal issue.

44 Issue 1. Retrieved January 31, 2005 from http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&an=15695115 Database: Business Source Premier

The vast amount of data circulating on the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. Information is so freely available that with each new innovation, it seems as if privacy is slowly fading away. With such sensitive data being exchanged so frequently, not only should online privacy be a corporate social responsibility for companies with an online presence, but it should also be an ethical responsibility for the consumers. Companies must do more to protect the information of their customers in order to maintain credibility and ethical soundness. The business model of any company with an online presence must treat the protection of customer information with high priority.

"The use of an e-signature is creating greater consumer confidence in online business transactions…" (Hammar, Sven), over the Internet. One of the most important elements to increasing online business, in conjunction with increasing sales, is to find which type of e-signature program to put into action. In order to make best use of electronic commerce opportunities, a secure environment with respect to electronic signatures is needed. Several different methods exist to sign documents electronically varying from very simple methods (e.g. inserting a scanned image of a hand-written signature in a word processing doc... ... middle of paper ... ... "PKI enables digital signatures."

The Internet is progressively developing and becoming an indispensable part of human life. People are likely to access information and news through the Internet, especially social media, more than traditional media like T.V, newspapers, magazines, or radio. Therefore, many business organizations take advantage of this trend to reach their customers more effectively and conduct their domestically and internationally commercial activities more easily. With the global and collaborative characteristics, social media technologies not only can help maintain relationships with customers and communication between internal employees, but also can support the product innovation and decision-making. This paper will analyze in detail the benefits social

These issues are designed in order to protect the customers from fraud of misuse of personal data and also laws to consider disabled consumers who may be using the internet site, therefore will require special features. M&S corporate identity, including the corporate logo design and the company corporate identity and branding is the most important information that this company can convey to its customers, therefore specific consideration are designed in regard of protecting the companies identity. Legal Issues Data protection considerations The Data Protection Act lays puts down a serious of rules that M&S must obey under their co-operation. Therefore as a successful trader any personal data that the company collects from its customers, such as name, address and billing information such as credit card details must be protected from fraud. Therefore M&S must deal fairly with the info they receive from consumers and tell the customer what data the have collected, upon that they must tell them what you are going to do with that information, and consult with the customers before taking any actions.

Companies must find way how to protect their information assets from attack, and make their network security is effective to block the threats either from outside or inside company. The Importance of Internal Security There are some reasons why inside intruders are as harmful and dangerous with outside intruder. It is because, for some organizations, especially big one, to support their company’ business, their facilitated their partners, customers, relations with the easiness technology can offer such as remote offices, mobile customers. All of the facilities boost up the use of corporate LAN increase, which resulted the increase of internal security threats, vulnerabilities to be attack by either outside or inside intruders. As written in Cryptek (2001), there are some problems make the inside network security is vulnerable from attack such as: the server operating systems and the password protection on most corporate network is sometimes do not work well.

The first is to protect individuals privacy rights (American Marketing Association). The next is extremely important for anyone using the Internet. However marketers must keep within rapidly changing Internet regulations. The third responsibility is "effective communication to organizational members on risks and policies related to Internet marketing" (American Marketing Association). In other words the marketer is responsible for the actions of the employees working underneath them.

The retailer faces a more knowledgeable and demanding customer and since business exists to satisfy the needs of the consumer, the demands and expectations of the consumer often have forced the retail organization to change their formats and product offerings. 3. Technology: With the increasing use of technology and the use of point of sale scanning systems and the bar code, a wealth of information is now available to the retailer. This information enables the retailer understand the consumer profile of his store, the products purchased, the price ranges and the promotional offers which have worked. The arrival of internet has made it possible for businesses to develop across geographies as both B2B and B2Clevels.

The increasing use of the Internet worldwide also increases the disputes escalating from Internet commerce. Numerous websites have been standard to determine these Internet disputes, as well as to simplify the reason of disputes that may occur offline. The unpredictable improvement of the use of the Internet makes it probable for businesses to grow their markets and offer services to large groups of e-consumers. Where off-line trades can lead to difficulty and disputes, the similar is correct for online transactions. In other words: e-commerce transactions will sometimes result in e-disputes.