Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Internet Commerce - Week 7 Tutorial Question

Tutorial Questions: Chapter 6

End-of-Chapter Questions (Page 351)

1. Compare and contrast stored value payment systems and checking transfers. (Question 3)

Checking transfer: funds transferred directly via a signed draft or check from a consumer’s checking account to a merchant or other individual

Stored value payment systems: account created by depositing funds into an account and from which funds are paid out or withdrawn as needed

2. Name six advantages and six disadvantages of using cash as a form of payment. (Question 53)

Advantages

Portable

No transaction fee

Low cognitive demands

Anonymous

Provides instant purchasing power

Private and difficult to trace

Disadvantages

Easily stolen

Limited to smaller transaction

Does not provide any float

When it is spent, it is gone

Purchases tend to be final and irreversible

Irrefutable otherwise agreed by the seller

3. Briefly discuss the disadvantages of credit cards as the standard for online payments. How does requiring a credit card for payment discriminate against some consumers? (Question 8)

Disadvantages:

  • Merchants pay a hefty transaction fee of 3% to 5% of the purchase price to the issuing bank
  • Risks of transaction (credit card fraud, repudiation of the transaction, or nonpayment)
  • Once a card is reported stolen is reported stolen, consumers are not liable for any subsequent charges
  • Credit cards have less finality than other payment systems because consumers can refute or repudiate under certain circumstances

Social equity: many people do not have access to credit cards (young adults, plus almost 100 million other adult Americans who cannot afford cards or are considered poor risk)

4. What are the primary differences between the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol and the SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) protocol? (Question 10)

5. Compare and contrast smart cards and traditional credit cards. (Question 14)

Project (Page 351)

1. Research the challenges associated with payments across international borders and prepare a brief presentation of your findings. Do most e-commerce companies conduct business internationally? How do they protect themselves from repudiation? How do exchange rates impact online purchases? What about shipping charges? Summarize by describing the difficulties between a U.S. customer and an international customer who each make a purchase from a U.S. e-commerce merchant. (Question 2)

Internet Commerce - Week 6 Tutorial Questions

Tutorial Questions: Chapter 5

End-of-Chapter Questions (Page 301)

1. Why are some online merchants hesitant to ship to international addresses? What are some of the risks of doing so? (Question 1)

2. What are some of the steps a company can take to curtail cybercriminal activity from within a business?(Question 11)

3. Compare and contrast firewalls and proxy servers and their security functions? (Question 14)

Firewalls : software applications that act as filters between a company’s private network and the internet itself, denying unauthorized remote client computers from attaching to your internal network.

Proxies : software servers that act primarily to limit access of internal clients to external internet servers and are frequently referred to as the gateway.

4. Identify and discuss the five steps in developing an e-commerce security plan. (Question 16)

  1. perform a risk assessment - an assessment of the risks and points of vulnerability

  1. develop a security policy - a set of statements prioritizing the information risks, identifying acceptable risk targets, and identifying the mechanisms for achieving these targets.

  1. develop an implementation plan - the action steps you will take to achieve the security plan

  2. create a security organization - educates and trains users, keep management aware of security threats and breakdowns, and maintains the tools chosen to implement security

  1. perform a security audit - involves the routine review of access logs

Project (Page 302)

1. Given the shift toward m-commerce, identify and discuss the new security threats to this type of technology. Prepare a presentation outlining your vision of the new opportunities for cybercrime.

Internet Commerce - Week 5 Tutorial Questions

Tutorial Questions

Week 5 (Chapter 4)

End-of-Chapter Questions (Page 242)

1. Define the systems development life cycle and discuss the various steps involved in creating an e-commerce site. (Question 2)

Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a methodology for understanding the business objectives of a system and designing an appropriate solution

Five major steps in the SDLC are:

o Systems analysis/planning

o Systems design

o Building the system

o Testing

o Implementation


2. Why is a Web site so costly to maintain? Discuss the main factors that impact cost? (Question 6)

Because maintaining a website means to maintain all the parts that makes that website works, eg. Servers, databases, etc.

3. Name five basic functionalities a Web server should provide. (Question 8)

  1. Processing of HTTP requests
  2. Security services (Secure Sockets Layer)
  3. Files Transfer Protocol
  4. Search engine
  5. Data capture
  6. E-Mail
  7. Site Management tools

4. What are the eight most important factors impacting Web site design, and how do they affect a site’s operation? (Question 12)

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Project (Page 243)

5. Visit several e-commerce sites, not including those mentioned in this chapter, and evaluate the effectiveness of the sites according to the eight criteria/functionalities listed in Table 4.10. Choose one site you feel does an excellent job on all the aspects of an effective site and create a presentation including screen shots to support your choice. (Question 2)

Internet Commerce - Tutorial Question Week 4 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7

E-Commerce Marketing Concepts

End-of-Chapter Questions (Page 433)

1. Name the five stages in the buyer decision process, and briefly describe the online and offline marketing activities used to influence each. (Question 7)

  • Awareness of need
  • Search for more information
  • Evaluation of alternatives
  • Actual purchase decision
  • Post-purchase contact with firm

2. Why are “little monopolies” desirable from a marketer’s point of view? (Question 8)

3. What are the components of the core product, actual product, and augmented product in a feature set? (Question 10)

4. List the differences among databases, data warehouses, and data mining. (Question 13)

  • Database: Software that stores records and attributes

  • Database management system (DBMS): Software used to create, maintain, and access databases

  • Data warehouse: Database that collects a firm’s transactional and customer data in a single location for offline analysis by marketers and site managers

5. Compare and contrast the four marketing strategies used in mass marketing, direct marketing, micromarketing, and one-to-marketing. (Question 17)

Marketing Strategies

Marketing Attributes

Product

Target

Pricing

Techniques

Mass Marketing

Simple

All consumers

One nation, one price

Mass media

Direct Marketing

Stratified

Segments

One price

Targeted Communications

Micromarketing

Complex

Micro-segments

Variable Pricing

Segment Profiles

One-to-one Marketing

Highly Complex

Individual

Unique Pricing

Individual profiles

6. How is online survey-taking and analysis different from the traditional process of mailing surveys? (Question 24)

By using online survey, a company can gather the information/data from the participants directly after they submit the survey online, whereas those of traditional mailing surveys need more time to gather the survey result/information (after the survey is completed, participant needs to send it back to the company by post services).

Projects (Page 434)

1. Find an example of a Web site that you feel does a good job of appealing to both goal-directed and experiential consumers. Explain your choice. (Question 2)

http://www.pooldawq.com/

This is one of the Online Billiards Store in US which sells anything about billiards in a very good and reasonable price. The shipping cost offered by this Online Store is very reasonable too, and this company offers free shipping to their customers who live in US.

Pooldawq.com offers a broad range pool/billiard cue and all the things the customers need in billiards game, and customers can decide which products to buy by searching based on Price range, Brands, or skill level (beginner, intermediate, and advanced).

Internet Commerce - Tutorial Question Ch3-1

Tutorial Questions: Chapter 3

End-of-Chapter Questions (Page 188)

1. What are the three basic building blocks of the Internet? (Question 1)

Packet Switching, which slices digital messages into packets, routes the packets along different communication paths as they become available, and then reassembles the packets once they arrive at their destination.

TCP/IP, which is the core communication protocol for the internet. TCP establishes the connections among sending and receiving Web computers and makes sure that packets sent by one computer are received in the sequence by the other, without any packets missing. IP provides the addressing scheme and is responsible for the actual delivery of the packets.

Client/server Technology, which makes it possible for large amounts of information to be stored on Web servers and shared with individual users on their client computers.

2. Why isn’t the Internet overloaded? Will it ever be at capacity? (Question 7)

It is not possible for internet to be overloaded, because it is forever growing.

3. Compare and contrast intranets, extranets, and the Internet as a whole. (Question 11)

Internet: An interconnected network of thousands of networks and millions of computers, linking businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, and individuals

Intranet: TCP/IP network located within a single organization for purposes of communication and information processing

Extranet: Formed when firms permit outsiders to access their internal TCP/IP networks

4. What are some of the challenges of policing the Internet? Who has the final say when it comes to content, such as with Yahoo! France? (Question 13)


5. Compare and contrast the capabilities of Wi-Fi and 3G wireless networks. (Question 15)

3G Wireless Networks: new generation of cellular phone standards that can connect users to the Web at 2.4 Mbps

Wi-Fi:

Project (Page 189)

Q2: Locate where cookies are stored on your computer. (They are probably in a folder entitled “cookies” within your browser program.) List the top 10 cookies you find, and write a brief report describing the kinds of sites that placed the cookies. What purpose do you think the cookies serve? Also, what do you believe are the major advantages and disadvantages of cookies? In your opinion, do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, or vice versa?

A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer's hard disk so that the website can remember who you are.

A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the "lifetime" of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number. Two types of cookies are used on this website-session cookies, which are temporary cookies that remain in the cookie file of your browser until you leave the site, and persistent cookies, which remain in the cookie file of your browser for much longer (though how long will depend on the lifetime of the specific cookie).

Cookies can help a website to arrange content to match your preferred interests more quickly. Most major websites use cookies. Cookies cannot be used by themselves to identify you.

Source: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/

Internet Commerce - Tutorial Task 2

Chapter 2 E-Commerce Business Models and Concepts

1. What are the eight key components of an effective business model? (Question 3, p.103)

  1. Value proposition
  2. Revenue model
  3. Market opportunity
  4. Competitive environment
  5. Competitive advantage
  6. Market Strategy
  7. Organizational development
  8. Management team

2. Besides music, what other forms of information could be shared via peer-to-peer sites such as Kazaa? Are there legitimate commercial uses for P2P commerce? (Question 6, p.105)

Video, Picture (image file) and any types of document.

Company can efficiently distribute massive amounts of information across an organization and also make it searchable.

3. What are the major differences between virtual storefronts such as Drugstore.com and bricks-and-clicks operations such as Walmart.com? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? (Question 13, p.106)

Major difference:

Virtual storefronts do not have any ties to a physical location.

Advantages of virtual storefronts are:

Low barriers to entry into Web e-tail market

Do not bear the costs associated with building and maintaining physical stores.

Disadvantages of virtual storefronts are:

Must build a brand name from scratch quickly and become profitable with no prior brand name or experience

Major advantage of bricks-and-clicks operations are:

4. What are four generic business strategies for achieving a profitable business? (Question 21, p.106)

Differentiation

Setting your firm or product apart from the competition

Cost

Unique set of business processes, a unique resource, or a low cost supplier

Scope

A scope strategy sets out to compete in all markets around the glose, rather than just locally or regionally


Focus

A plan to compete within a narrow market segment or product segment

5. How has Priceline (and similar online services) impacted the travel services industry? (Question 3, p.103)

Introducing price sensitivity signal into the industry which segments the market