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MIS207: E-Business
Instructor

Dr. Samim Al Azad (SAA2)

Post-doc (LU), PhD (SNU), MBA and BBA (DU)

Assistant Professor
School of Business and Economics
North South University
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Chapter-1: Introduction
• E-commerce: A brief history
• E-commerce Vs. E-business
• E-commerce and its features
• Define e-marketplaces and list their components.
• Describe Customer Shopping Mechanisms: Storefronts, Malls,
and Portals
• EC merchant software functionalities: electronic catalogs,
search engines, and shopping carts.
• Describe Social Software Tools: Blogs, Wikis , and Twitter
• Some Terminologies
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E-commerce: A brief history

• 1995–2000: Innovation
• Key concepts developed
• Dot-coms bust; heavy venture capital investment

• 2001–2006: Consolidation
• E-commerce growing at a rapid pace
• Sales and profit growth return
• Emphasis on business-driven approach (retailer, online marketing,
online auction)

• 2006–Present: Reinvention
• Extension of technologies
• New business models based on user-generated content, social
networking, services
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E-commerce Vs. E-business

• E-commerce
• All electronically mediated commercial transaction
between organizations and customers (or third parties it
deals with).
• Example: selling and purchasing goods and services to the
customers in online

• E-business
• The transformation of key business process through the
use of internet technologies.
• Example: all electronic mediated transactions, both within an
organization and with external stakeholders, and other supporting
business processes.
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Relationship between e-commerce and e-

business
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Types of E-commerce

• Selling Side E-commerce

 Transaction e-commerce sites
 Service-oriented relationship-building site
 Brand-building sites
 Portal, publisher or media sites

• Buying Side E-commerce

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Fig: The distinction between buy-side and sell-side e-
commerce
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Internet, extranet and Intranet

• How will we distinguish them?

• Internet: open for all around the globe.

• Extranet: open for an organizations’ own employees and some
trusted stakeholders but restricted for others.
• Intranet: only for an organizations’ own (internal) employees.
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Internet, extranet and Intranet

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Unique features of e-commerce technology

Electronic commerce (EC)

The process of buying, selling, or exchanging products,
services, or information via internet.
1. Ubiquity
2. Global reach
3. Universal standards
4. Information richness
5. Interactivity
6. Information density
7. Personalization/ customization
8. Social technology
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Unique features of e-commerce technology

1. Ubiquity
•The state of being everywhere, especially at all time (Omnipresence)
• Internet/Web technology available everywhere: work, home, etc.
anytime
2. Global reach
• E-commerce technology reaches across national boundaries, around
the globe
3. Universal standards
• One set of technology standards: technical standards for conducting
e-commerce are universal standard
4. Information richness
• Complexity and content of the message: Supports video, audio, and
text messages
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Unique features of e-commerce technology

5. Interactivity
• E-commerce technology works through interaction with the user ( 2 ways
interaction between merchant and consumer)
6. Information density
• The total amount and quality of information available to all market
participants

7. Personalization/customization
• Technology permits modification of messages, goods (based on
customer preferences)
8. Social technology
• The technology promotes user content generation and social networking
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Business models of e-commerce

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Business models based on

market relationship

• Business-to-consumer (B2C)
 Consumer shopping on the Web (www.daraz.com.bd )

• Business-to-business (B2B): (www.bangladesh.busytrade.com)

 Transactions conducted between business organizations
 Supply management (procurement) departments negotiate
purchase transactions with suppliers

• Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)
 Between consumers (www.bikroy.com)
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Electronic Marketplace

E-marketplace
An online market, usually B2B (B2C also included), in which
buyers and sellers exchange goods or services.

Marketspace
A marketplace in which sellers and buyers exchange goods and
services for money (or for other goods and services), but do so
electronically.
 A new distribution of goods and services (digital goods)
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Components and Participants in E-marketplace

 Customers
 More than 2 billion people are the potential customer

 Sellers
 Million of storefronts are on the web who offers variety of P/S

 Products and services

 Digital products: Goods that can be transformed to digital format
and delivered over the Internet

 Infrastructure
 Includes electronic networks, hardware, software, and more
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Components and Participants in E-marketplace

 Front end
 The portion of an e-seller’s business processes through which
customers interact, including the seller’s portal, electronic catalogs, a
shopping cart, a search engine, and a payment gateway

 Back end
 The activities that support online order fulfillment, inventory
management, purchasing from suppliers, payment processing,
packaging, and delivery

 Intermediary
 A third party that operates between sellers and buyers

 Other business partners (Shippers), support services

(certification)
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Customer Shopping Mechanisms:

Storefronts, Malls, and Portals

Webstore (storefront)
 A single company’s website where products or services are
sold; usually has an online shopping cart associated with
it.
 Many webstores target a specific industry and find their
own unique corner of the market
 Aarong’s web site

Storefront may belongs to a manufacturer or to a

retailer, or to an individuals selling from at home.
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Customer Shopping Mechanisms:

Storefronts, Malls, and Portals

E-mall (online mall)

An online shopping center where many online stores are
located.

Types of Stores and Malls

 General stores/malls (all kind of products/ Amazon.com)
 Specialized stores/malls (only one or few kind of P./
1800flowers.com, cars.com)
 Regional versus global stores (Parnshop.com/ hothothot.com)
 Pure-play versus click-and-mortar stores (fully online, amazon/
both, Walmart)
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Customer Shopping Mechanisms:

Storefronts, Malls, and Portals

Web portal
A single point of access, through a Web browser, to critical business
information located inside and outside (via Internet) an organization
Types of Portals
Commercial (public) portals (offer content for diverse
community/google, yahoo)
Corporate portals (offer rich content within corporate and partners
community/ company's own portal, NSU website)
Publishing portals (communities with specific interest)
Personal portals (specific, narrow, and personalized content/ netvibes)
Mobile portal: A portal accessible via a mobile device.
Voice portal: A portal accessed by telephone or cell phone.
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Merchant Solutions:
Electronic Catalogs, Search Engines, and Shopping Carts

 To enable selling online, a website usually needs EC merchant

server software (OsCommerce.com)
 Functionalities of merchant software:
 E-catalogs,
 Search engines, and
 E-shopping curt

A. Electronic catalogs (e-catalogs)

The presentation of product information in an electronic form;
the backbone of most e-selling sites
 The dynamics of the information presentation
 The degree of customization
 Integration of business process
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Merchant Solutions:
Electronic Catalogs, Search Engines, and Shopping Carts

B. Search engine
 A computer program that can access databases of Internet resources,
search for specific information or key words, and report the results.

Types of EC Searches
 Internet/Web Search
Standard search that involves any documents on the web
 Enterprise search
The practice of identifying and enabling specific content across the
enterprise to be indexed, searched, and displayed to authorized users
Desktop search
Search tools that search the contents of a user’s or organization’s
computer files, rather than searching the Internet
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Merchant Solutions:
Electronic Catalogs, Search Engines, and Shopping Carts

C. Electronic shopping cart

An order-processing technology that allows customers
to accumulate items they wish to buy while they
continue to shop.

OTHER MECHANISMS IN MERCHANT SOFTWARE

 Product configuration (dell)
 Order tracking, and
 Payment process
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Social Software Tools:

From Blogs to Wikis to Twitter

Social software
A software product that enables people to engage, connect,
and collaborate through computer-mediated
communication.

A. Blog
 A personal website that is open to the public to read and to interact
with; dedicated to specific topics or issues
 Vlog (video blog): A blog with video content

 Business Application of Blogs

 Blogs for public relations (stonyfield.com)
 New business model from blogging (Huffington post)
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Social Software Tools:

From Blogs to Wikis to Twitter

B. Twitter
A free microblogging service that allows its users
to send and read other users’ updates
 tweets: Text-based posts up to 140 characters in length
posted to Twitter

 Business Application of Twitter

 Communication and collaboration tools
 Public Relations
 Customer feedback
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Social Software Tools:

From Blogs to Wikis to Twitter

C. Wiki (wikilog)
A blog that allows everyone to participate as a
peer; anyone may add, delete, or change content

Business Applications of Wikis

 Collaborative interaction throughout the
organization
 Researchers post a hypothesis and then invite
commentary and suggestions
 Dashboard users use wiki and request for help
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E-business Terminology

• E-business
• E-commerce
• E-marketing
• Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
• Intranet, extranet and internet
• Information richness
• Information asymmetry
• The internet and www
• Semantic web