Electronic Commerce Applications Research Articles

Advancing E-Commerce Beyond Readiness in a Developing Country

This paper identifies factors affecting the assimilation of electronic commerce in Ghana and the solutions that Ghanaian firms have developed. Drawing from the elements of two electronic commerce readiness frameworks, the study analyzes the readiness of Ghana to support the conduct of electronic commerce at the firm-level. The study covers the government, technology, market and culture readiness factors. Findings suggest that social networks, managerial capabilities and government commitment have an attendant effect on adoption and use of tangible resources like electronic commerce applications. The findings imply that future research and practitioner efforts should focus on developing a broader perspective to address electronic commerce challenges encompassing issues like how firms can advance to more complex forms of e-commerce after initial e-commerce adoption.

Fair exchange of valuable information: A generalised framework

This paper aims to propose a general framework for fair exchanges of valuable information through digital signatures and cryptographic keys over networks, which are essential for e-commerce (electronic commerce) applications to prevent fraudulent or unfair on-line activities. This new framework incorporates a set of signature schemes as primitives, offers three generalised functions for the generation, verification and recovery of verifiably encrypted signatures and keys using these signature schemes, and provides a generic protocol built on these thee functions to accomplish various fair exchange scenarios of valuable information. The security analysis of the framework is also presented to confirm its assurance of fairness in exchange. Moreover, a comparison with related work is carried out to demonstrate the novel features of the framework, which can be highlighted by a good blend of generality, flexibility, efficiency and simplicity offered by the framework.

A mobile network operator-independent mobile signature service

Electronic signature (e-signature) is an important element in electronic commerce and government applications because it guarantees non-repudiation of transactions. E-signatures generated in a secure signature creation device can be considered legally equivalent to a handwritten signature. Mobile devices based on SIM/USIM cards, which are broadly extended, are the ideal devices to create these e-signatures (named mobile signatures or m-signatures). Furthermore, thanks to m-signatures the development of m-signature-based applications becomes simpler for mobile application/service providers. There are several solutions to create m-signatures. However, current solutions present some problems: either they require that the solution is developed by every mobile network operator or the components to implement it in the mobile handset are too complex. As a solution to these problems we present an m-signature service that is not linked to a mobile network operator and where the client has more control over the signatures to perform them in an easier way. This paper presents the description and analysis of this new m-signature service as well as the prototype that is being tested in the University of Murcia.

Electronic commerce applications for supply chain integration and competitive capabilities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impacts of supplier‐ and customer‐oriented electronic communication technologies (ECTs) (electronic data interchange (EDI) and internet‐based) on supply chain integration and manufacturing competitive capabilities (flexibility and quality).Design/methodology/approachThe research model is based on resource‐based view of technology use, ECTs, and supply chain management literature. Data from 711 international manufacturing firms International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS IV) are analyzed using exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to test the proposed relationships.FindingsThe results suggest: the importance of applying two specific ECTs (EDI and internet‐based) for both supplier and customer integration; and the direct impact of supplier integration and customer integration on manufacturing competitive capabilities.Research limitations/implicationsExcept for perceptual biases inherent to survey methodology, this research provides rich implications on ECTs (particularly, EDI and internet‐based) on supply chain integration and manufacturing competitive capabilities.Practical implicationsThe findings of this research provide practical management insights on ECTs investment and deployment practices. Creation and delivery of values require effective integration of technologies for key performance outcomes across suppliers, customers and internal business processes.Originality/valueThis paper fills the research gap by presenting a research model and empirically validates how ECTs impact on quality and flexibility based on rich empirical data of 711 firms of manufacturing firms.

Do Competitive Priorities Drive Adoption of Electronic Commerce Applications? Testing the Contingency and Institutional Views

This paper expands on recent research by Huang and colleagues examining the drivers of electronic commerce (e-commerce) adoption. Two competing theories are evaluated as predictors of e-commerce adoption: contingency theory and institutional theory. For the contingency view, we focus on three strategic priorities (cost, flexibility and delivery), and for the institutional view, we examine three institutional factors (region, industry and information technology benchmarking). The model is evaluated with logistic regression analysis using survey data from nine countries and three industries. While contingency theory is the norm in the literature, we find only limited evidence that competitive priorities guide e-commerce adoption. By contrast, institutional factors have greater explanatory power.

A strategy-oriented operation module for recommender systems in E-commerce

Electronic commerce (EC) has become an important support for business and is regarded as an efficient system that connects suppliers with online users. Among the applications of EC, a recommender system (RS) is undoubtedly a popular issue to make the best recommendation to the users. Even if many approaches have been proposed to perfect the recommendation, a comprehensive module comprising of essential sub-modules of input profiles, a recommendation scheme, and an output interface of recommendations in the RS is still lacking. Besides, the fundamental issue of profit consideration for an EC company is not stressed in general terms. Therefore, this study aims to construct an RS with a strategy-oriented operation module regarding the above aspects; and with this module, an approach named clique-effects collaborative filtering ( CECF) for predicting the consumer's purchase behavior was proposed. Finally, we applied our proposed module to a 3C retailer in Taiwan, and promising results were obtained. Scope and Purpose This study aims to construct a comprehensive module for the recommender systems. The proposed strategy-oriented operation module comprises the essential parts of a recommender system. By utilizing the proposed module with marketing strategies and an effective on-line interface scheme, the recommender system could emphasize not only the customer's satisfaction as conventional recommender system suggested, but also the supplier's profit which shall be an important issue to an E-commerce company. Thus, a better recommendation environment could be displayed.

Web user behavioral profiling for user identification

In this paper, we propose a simple, yet powerful approach to profile users' web browsing behavior for the purpose of user identification. The importance of being able to identify users can be significant given a wide variety of applications in electronic commerce, such as product recommendation, personalized advertising, etc. We create user profiles capturing the strength of users' behavioral patterns, which can be used to identify users. Our experiments indicate that these profiles can be more accurate at identifying users than decision trees when sufficient web activities are observed, and can achieve higher efficiency than Support Vector Machines. The comparisons demonstrate that profile-based methods for user identification provide a viable and simple alternative to this problem.

The hybrid web personalised recommendation based on web usage mining

Recommendation systems represent user preferences for the purpose of suggesting items to purchase or examine. They have become important applications in electronic commerce for information access and for providing suggestions that effectively prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. A variety of techniques have been proposed for performing recommendation, including content, collaborative and knowledge-based techniques. However, there remain many challenges in deploying traditional recommendation techniques for e-commerce. This paper addresses these key challenges and proposes new techniques that combine the content and collaborative-based filtering to capitalise on their respective strengths and thereby achieve better performance. We describe new architecture for hybrid recommendation system. The results obtained empirically demonstrate that the proposed recommendation algorithms perform better and alleviate the challenges such as data sparsity and scalability.

A Pattern-Oriented Methodology for Engineering High-Quality E-Commerce Applications

This article proposes, develops, and explores a methodology for engineering electronic commerce applications (ECA) aiming for “high-quality.” In doing so, the development and maintenance of ECA is undertaken from the perspective of Web Engineering. The relevant quality attributes and corresponding stakeholder types for the ECA are identified, and the role of a flexible development process and the challenges in making optimal use of patterns are analyzed. The activities of a systematic selection and application of patterns to the macro- and micro-architecture design of business-to-consumer (B2C) ECA are given. The scope and limitations of the proposed methodology are discussed, and some possible directions for its evolution are outlined.

Certificateless Proxy Signature Scheme with Provable Security

This paper studies proxy signatures in the newly proposed certificateless public key setting. The authors present a very strong security model for certificateless proxy signature schemes against both Super Type I Adversary and Super Type II Adversary. And also an efficient construction of certificateless proxy signature scheme using bilinear maps is put forward. The security of this scheme is based on the infeasibility of the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem and is formally proven under the security model of certificateless proxy signature schemes. Due to its security, high efficiency and freedom from certificate management, it may have practical applications in electronic commerce and mobile agent systems, etc.

Study of Reverse Logistics in the E-commerce Environment

Application of electronic commerce promotes logistics development.With the market completion enhancing, corporations need decrease their costs and increase consummers’ satisfaction. These problems make the reverse logistics’ value exposed in modern logistics. From the classification and characteristic of the reverse logistic, this paper analyzes the reasons and the problems in the development of the reverse logistic, also gives out some symmetries on how to solove these problems.All this can make the reverse logistics in the electronic commerce develop.

A countable and time-bound password-based user authentication scheme for the applications of electronic commerce

In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient user authentication scheme with countable and time-bound features. The countable feature is to limit the use to a certain number of times, which means that the users are able to successfully log into the system in a fixed number of times. The feature of the time-bound allows each login ticket to have a period of expiration. In other words, if a login request is overdue, it would not be available anymore. These features make our scheme more reliable for applications in the field of electronic commerce, such as on-line games, pay-TV, and so on. Since our scheme does not require any password or verification table and can avoid replay attacks, it is under firm security. Moreover, our scheme shows a lower computational overhead on the user side. Therefore, it offers an efficient and adequate alternative for the implementations in the mobile environment with limited computing capability.

Intelligent Negotiation Agents in Electronic Commerce Applications

Intelligent Negotiation Agents in Electronic Commerce Applications

How to Construct Forward Secure Single-Server, Multi-Server and Threshold-Server Assisted Signature Schemes Using Bellare-Miner Scheme

Server-assisted signature plays an important role in all kinds of applications in electronic commerce. It can be applied to the settings where a user employs public network servers to help her execute digital signature operations. In this paper, we discuss a problem of how to construct forward secure single-server, multi-server and threshold-server assisted signature schemes using Bellare-Miner Scheme and propose three signature schemes. In the single-server assisted signature scheme, the user (signer) can employ a server to help her produce a signature. In themulti-server assisted scheme, the number of employed servers is increased to n, therefore, it is infeasible for an attacker to forge a valid signature if she can’t corrupt all servers and the signer. In the threshold-server assisted signature scheme, the generation of a valid signature needs the cooperation of the user and a quorum of servers. The scheme is more robust because the system can still get the correct signature as soon as no more than threshold servers are corrupted. These three schemes maintain the forward secure property, that is, even if the current secret key is exposed, an adaptive chosen-message adversary can’t forge any signature pertaining to previous time period. Finally, we prove the proposed schemes are correct and forward secure.

Mobile and Electronic Commerce Systems and Technologies

The emergence of wireless and mobile networks has made possible the introduction of electronic commerce to a new application and research subject: mobile commerce. Understanding or constructing a mobile or an electronic commerce system is an arduous task because the system involves a wide variety of disciplines and technologies and the technologies are constantly changing. To facilitate understanding and constructing such a system, this article divides the system into six components: (i) applications, (ii) client computers or devices, (iii) mobile middleware, (iv) wireless networks, (v) wired networks, and (vi) host computers. Elements in these components specifically related to the subject are described in detail and lists of current technologies for component construction are discussed. Another important and complicated issue related to the subject is the mobile or electronic commerce application programming. It includes two types of programming: client-side and server-side programming, which will be introduced too.

A New Partially Blind Signature Based on Factoring and Discrete Logarithms

Partially blind signatures played an important role in many electronic commerce applications. Many existing partially blind signature scheme based on a single hard problem but not secure. In this study, we propose a secure partially blind signature scheme based on factoring and discrete logarithms and show that the proposed scheme satisfies the partial blindness, randomization, unlinkability and unforgeability properties. We also analyse the computation cost of the proposed scheme.

Drivers and Inhibitors of Online Donations to Nonprofit Organizations

ABSTRACT Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of scholarly literature on electronic commerce, few authors have combined these two fields to tackle the issue of online donations to nonprofit organizations. In this paper we first present a framework that illustrates several antecedents of online donations. After discussing the descriptive results from two surveys, we compare different user groups regarding their attitudes toward online donations. The results suggest that our scales exhibit sufficient reliability and validity and that the two groups differ significantly. Furthermore, we conduct a regression analysis with the cause, trust in the organization, trust in the Internet, and privacy as independent variables and the people's intention to donate online as the dependent variable. Trust in the Internet turns out to be by far the most important influencing factor, exhibiting a significant influence on people's attitude toward donating to nonprofit organizations online. INTRODUCTION Nonprofit organizations seek to effect positive change for the public good. In order for them to fulfill their mission they are dependent on donations from the general public (Guy & Patton, 1989). Over the past decade, electronic-commerce applications have become an indispensable communication channel, supporting the work of nonprofit organizations in two ways. First, e-commerce helps them to disseminate information and communicate with audiences more rapidly. Second, the Internet functions as a fundraising channel, enabling nonprofit organizations to solicit donations online, which reduces their expenses for attracting donations. Offering information, interaction and fundraising capabilities to nonprofits, the Internet has opened up unparalleled opportunities for nonprofits to further their causes and enter into relationships with potential, current, and lapsed donors (MacKay, Parent, & Gemino, 2004; Oly Ndubisi, 2007; Treiblmaier et. al., 2004). However, nonprofits typically have limited skills, time and budget available to develop and maintain sophisticated Web sites (Hooper & Stobart, 2003). Loiacono and McCoy (2004) have shown that only a small amount of nonprofit websites can be accessed by people with disabilities. Since accessibility is one important indicator of how up-to-date a website is, this suggests that many nonprofit websites lag behind current standards of modern web development and design and need to acquire technological expertise to exploit such opportunities (Te'eni & Young, 2003). Nonprofit websites have also been found to lag behind commercial websites in terms of relational constructs that facilitate use of the site as well as navigation, interaction, and customization on the site (Sargeant, West, & Jay, 2007). A large proportion of nonprofits use third parties to process their donations, as they do not have the required expertise in-house (Waters, 2007). Nonprofits therefore also face the problem that the expenses associated with building and maintaining websites are perceived as a waste of their members' contributions (Wenham, Stephens, & Hardy, 2003). Another challenge in online fundraising is the Web's nature as a pull medium, which entails that site traffic is a determinant of the volume of donations collected online. Even regular donors of a particular nonprofit organization may never visit its website, unless it offers vital information, such as health and medical information (Sargeant, 2001). Despite these challenges, more and more nonprofits compete for donations online. In this study we seek to identify factors fostering or hindering people's propensity to donate online. We first review the relevant literature and present a framework identifying the antecedents of online fundraising, before we introduce the research design. We then go on to present and discuss the findings of a survey conducted among donors and non-donors, including a student convenience sample serving as a control group. …

Achieving advantages from business-to-business electronic commerce: an empirical validation of an integrative framework

This study aims at contributing to a better understanding of business-to-business Electronic Commerce (EC) advantages and determinants of these advantages. A research model was empirically tested on a sample of 143 Canadian companies. Key findings indicate that the most important advantages of EC are increased productivity, increased quality of products and services, competitive advantage, and to a lesser extent, sales growth and increased revenues. Cost reductions were marginal. The main determinants of EC advantages include the type of EC use, and the internal and external integrations of EC applications. The strategic orientation of the firm and the organisational context exert only an indirect effect on EC advantages.

From virtual to augmented reality in financial trading: a CYBERII application

Abstract Digital media technology is becoming an integral part of our daily activities, with widespread penetration in various application domains including arts, medicine, education, and commerce. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the horizon of emerging digital media technologies in electronic financial trading with reference to a novel application drawing expertise from two important fields of study, namely: digital media (video and image) processing and augmented reality. The paper presents an ergonomic study that considers the potential utility and usability of augmented reality (AR) in finance. In order to justify the outcome of this ergonomic study, the authors describe the technology under study (CYBERII) and its implementation in finance. This ergonomic study is based on a comparative analysis of the use of AR with a counterpart virtual reality (VR) approach used for the same application. The comparative analysis highlights an added value in the shift from the use of VR to AR in electronic financial trading. This added value is gained from augmented realism and less constrained interaction. The paper discusses the challenges and rewards of the emerging digital mediatechnologies in meeting the needs of electronic commerce applications, particularly in electronic financial trading. The main considerations taken into account are the realism of rendering, systemportability, and widespread usability. This study motivates further ergonomic studies involving the evaluation of augmented reality integration including CYBERII technology, in the field of electronic commerce.

Statistical Intrusion Detection in Data Networks

The growth of application of electronic commerce relying on Internet and the network attack have become more common and sophisticated. The network systems demand more elaborate protections measures to ensure safely operation, and continue provide critical services. These measures include meth- ods of detection and response to intrusion attempts in real time. In this work we propose statistical models and multivariate classifiers to detect anomalous traffic shape and the use of neural network classifier. Numerical results are shown for the simples case of denial of service attack.