Website comparison services cover a broad array of products. Consumers can get a comparative analysis of the various products being sold by different lenders. A buyer can see the price in the Internet and he will be aware whether he thinks the price mentioned is worth or not. It will provide full details of the costs of different companies and the quality of those products as well. It will help shoppers in doing the research work faster and makes them to do the shopping without going to different sites and different companies. On the other hand, visiting the sites directly gives the customer control on how the order gets routed to the various exchanges. Its just the customer and the market. Consumers directly buy products and services from a seller interactively in real-time without an intermediary service over the HYPERLINK httpen.wikipedia.orgwikiInternet o InternetInternet. There is immediate interaction unlike when you surf through a comparison site.
In directly purchasing a product, word of mouth has become a leading way by which people find shopping websites. When an online shopper has a good first experience with a certain website, sixty percent of the time they will return to that website to buy more.
With the advent and proliferation of the Internet, many aspects of business and market activities are changing. New forms of intermediation also called cybermediaries are becoming increasingly important as a coordinator of interaction between buyers and sellers in the electronic market environment. However consumers can always buy directly without intermediaries. For example, theycould buy books online directly from publishers who would ship the books directly from their printing plants. Authors can sell e-books directly to the consumer.
Branding plays an integral part behind a companys success. As in real life scenarios, a brand is the companys identity on the web and differentiates it from its competitors. Online branding decides the perception of targeted audience towards a companys e-commerce store. Consumers who rely on a particular brand wont need to do site comparisons. The customer visits the site directly.
B3. Discuss what the practical success factors are in using digital media in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), contrasting B2C and B2B relationships, supporting your answer with real-world examples.
The emergence of e-Marketplaces is causing new trading relationships to be established based upon highly competitive commercial terms. Nonetheless, for trading to commence some prior negotiations need to be undertaken between the business partners. Aside from commercial conditions, there are other matters of product quality and delivery that need to be addressed. Equally the process is driven by recognized business transactions and the supplier will most certainly demand a purchase order from the buyer to initiate the supply of goods. In business-to-consumer (B2C) markets the retailer is expected to handle many thousands of spontaneous purchasing transactions from equal numbers of anonymous consumers for which no prior commercial relationship necessarily existed. In other words, a consumer may never have purchased from the retailer previously, and certainly no preconditions existed prior to the consumer committing to the transaction by selecting the submit key on their Web browser. Since no prior commercial arrangements exist, sellers are naturally concerned to authenticate the buyer or limit their commercial risk. A fraudulent order from a non- existing customer could result in significant business resources being consumed or diverted from a genuine customer. For this reason e-tailers normally insist upon payment with order, typically by credit card, as a condition of doing business over the Internet.
B2B CRM is probably older and more established than consumer or B2C CRM, primarily because even before computers made it possible, sales reps would keep records of individual contacts, because it was worth it to do so. The difference between relationship management within the B2C space and within in B2B space is that in B2B you have just a few large customers, big organizations. And that means the statistical tools that are useful in B2C CRM are largely not relevant in B2B CRM. Another point is that, In the B2B world the channel distribution process can be extremely complex. You can have value added resellers in the IT business, for example, or you can have installers, enablers -- lots of people at different gates between the marketer and the customer.
C3. A major issue in the success of B2C retailing is consumer confidence in the security of their personal data, especially financial data, submitted to the online retailer. Describe the threats to which online transactions are vulnerable, and discuss what controls (both technical and organisational) the retailer can deploy to counter these, balancing your discussion with what consumers should do to protect their data, illustrating your answer with appropriate real-world examples.
Exchanging sensitive information on the internet without the appropriate security measures can make a company, as well as their clients and employees, vulnerable to phishing activities, online scams and identity theft. Security vulnerabilities typically arise in shopping cart and online payment systems because most web application developers are not well versed with secure programming techniques. Here are three of the most common vulnerabilities B2C retailers have to face
SQL injection refers to the inclusion of SQL characters in the user input. While the user keys in the right information, it will be the attacker who queries the backend database, and receives the correct response while the user receives an error message. SQL injection techniques vary depending on the type of database being used. The most popular occurrences of SQL injections were on the ecommerce sites of Guess, and Petco.
Price manipulation is a vulnerability which is unique to shopping carts and payment gateways. Typically, the total payable price for purchased goods is stored in a hidden HTML and is sent to the payment gateway. Attackers can change the HTML field containing the final payable price and may go unnoticed if the volume of transactions is high. This vulnerability can be found in third party software such as 3D3 ShopFactory Shopping Cart and Smartwin Technologys CyberOffice Shopping Cart 2.0.
Buffer overflows involve the sending of large number of bytes which cannot be handled by a web application. This usually returns an error which contains the path of functions used by the database to process queries. Once this happens, attackers can now access the restricted admin folder and modify them according to their purpose. Multiple buffer overflows has been noted with software such as the PDGSoft Shopping Cart.
Fortunately, there are many ways that a company can secure its database. First level protection can involve the frequent changing of the password, and the use of unidentifiable keyword combinations. Many websites require their members to input alphanumeric combinations. Most passwords are case sensitive, and cannot be the same as the userid. Moreover, there are certain sites which prohibit the use of identifiable words as password. There are also several authentication methods which can be used by the site. Some of these include out-of-band authentication, adaptive authentication, software and hardware based one-time passwords.
Secure websites and pages will feature two important conditions that indicate they are using encryption technology and a 128-bit Secure Socket Layer certificates. This is indicated by https (letters after the http portion of the URL), and means that the server is a secure one. Microsoft Windows also offers an alert that relays a message indicating whether information over the network is secure. For customers, it is important that they check if the company they are dealing with is offering a safe checkout process. This is typically indicated by the VeriSign and TrustE logo. Companies can also signup with the Better Business Bureau to get privacy policy seals and enhance the sites credibility. Also, sites which require the input of credit card information and checking account information must have a padlock icon which ensures that the site has been assigned the authority to accept secure and protected information.
Many of the potential concerns that surround the safety of online shopping have been resolved by online payment services. The premier service of this type for example is PayPal, which has set the benchmarks for secure Internet transactions and ease of use. When purchasing something using PayPal, users simply carry out the transaction through their PayPal accounts, rather than a credit card. PayPal then charges each purchase to the individuals credit card or checking account. Because all PayPal transactions are based on the users e-mail address, and all payment processing is through the PayPal merchants never have access and store the users account information.
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