Successful E-commerce Research Articles

Cooperation as an instrument of competence management to implement successful e-commerce business models

The example of German food home-delivery concepts shows that e-commerce business models differ from traditional retail business models in many ways. No potential participant can ever have all the necessary resources and competences to implement a competitive business model without external support. This is why cooperation seems to be a useful tool for competence management. The resource-based view will serve as theoretical background for the following analysis. The required and available competences of conceivable players can be identified, and isolation mechanisms of resources that have to be combined can be overcome. Features of resources can be identified that recommend special types of cooperations with the intention to establish and operate a business model. Up to now, the types of joint venture that have already been established in other industries and e-commerce business models have not yet been established in the German food home-delivery market. Some individual attempts to implement such types of business models were soon stopped.

Globalization and E-Commerce II: Environment and Policy in Germany

• Due to its economic power as the largest economy in Europe and third largest in the world, Germany inevitably will play an important role in e-commerce. • After the improvement and diffusion of high-speed Internet access, like ISDN or DSL, Germany enjoys more ISDN telephone lines than any country; also the highest DSL per capita ratio, in Europe. • Germany includes a large, highly educated and relatively wealthy population, which is an important prerequisite for successful e-commerce activities. Due to foreign language skills in the German population (every pupil is required to learn English; a large number know basic French or Spanish, too), the language barrier to using international Web sites is small. Moreover, the German education system puts increasing emphasis on information and communications technology (ICT) skills. • Invention activity in some areas of ICT shows signs of improvement. Starting from a low level, patent activity in mobile communications and the Internet grew faster in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. This growth could be viewed as an early indicator of strengthening the mobile e-commerce sector in Germany and may be interpreted as an important effort in catching-up with overall e-commerce development. • More than 80% of the GNP is created in mid-sized companies (Mittelstand), which traditionally are considered as more flexible and innovative than large enterprises. The majority of these small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can access the Internet. Looking at Internet penetration, German SMEs are at the top together with SMEs in Scandinavian countries. • The central position of Germany as a hub to Europe together with the excellent public and private transport infrastructure is a competitive advantage to attract foreign investments.

The Strategic Impact of Internet Technology in Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Firms: Insights from a Knowledge Management Perspective

This paper conceptualises the strategic impact of new Internet technology in biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms. It argues that competitiveness of modern, agile pharmaceutical businesses depend on their ability to create and commercialise new knowledge as much as on their ability to produce new products. Hence, knowledge production and intellectual property management provide a strong foundation for emerging, successful e-commerce strategies. The authors suggest Knowledge Management (KM) plays a key role in determining organizational performance levels and value creation. KM refers to technologies for processing information and generating and distributing knowledge, but also to organizational structures (such as virtual enterprise designs) that increase strategic fit and effectiveness of KM implementations. The Internet is seen as core technology enabling the creation of organizational networks (virtual teams; virtual customer-supplier communities). More specifically, this paper devises a new classificatory framework that categorises the strategic impact of Internet technology in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, which is based on three key dimensions: converting information into knowledge, the redesign of the innovation process, and knowledge-oriented organisational structuring. The authors extend their framework beyond the boundaries of the firm to include relationship with customers, suppliers, intermediaries such as specialist biotech companies and healthcare professionals.

Comercio electrónico: la fidelización del usuario

The article discusses the current reshaping of internet as regards digital business. Definitions are provided for the concept of electronic commerce and the foundations on which to develop an e-commerce project are described. Highlighted is the importance of tools for building customer loyalty for successful e-commerce projects and a model is proposed for representing the relationship between the corporate information system and processes for capturing clients. Finally, the authors stress the need to integrate the tools managing client information with the overall corporate information system. Likewise, the feedback generated by the information system must be incorporated back into business procedures in order to improve client services and satisfaction.

Businesses as Buildings: Metrics for the Architectural Quality of Internet Businesses

Metrics for the architectural quality of Internet businesses are essential in gauging the success and failure of e-commerce. This study proposes six dimensions of architectural metrics for Internet businesses: internal stability, external security, information gathering, order processing, system interface, and communication interface. The metrics are based on the three constructs that have been used to evaluate buildings in the real world. The structural construct indicates that Internet businesses need to be stable internally and secure externally. The functional construct implies that Internet businesses should provide convenient functions in the information-gathering and order-processing phases. Finally, the representational construct indicates that they need to provide a pleasant interface both to the systemand to those using it. For each of the six metrics, we have constructed questionnaires to measure the perceived level of architectural quality and identified feature lists that may be closely related to the perceived quality level. Large-scale empirical studies were conducted both to validate the proposed metrics and to explore their relevance across four Internet business domains. The validity of the metrics has been obtained in three ways. First, the content validity of the metrics was assured by pretests and pilot survey. Second, the results from the confirmatory factor analysis showed that the metrics had high convergent and discriminant validities. Finally, the reliability coefficients were found to be high enough to establish the reliability of the proposed metrics. The relevance of the metrics has been explored in two ways. Structural equation models were used to test the causal relations between the three constructs and user satisfaction, as well as customer loyalty, in four domains. Correlation analyses were used to explore the relations between the perceived architectural quality and objective design features in four domains. This paper ends with the implications and limitations of the study results.

Classifying digital products

A framework for classifying digital products is essential for devising successful e-commerce strategies.

The 4S Web-Marketing Mix model

This paper reviews the criticism on the 4Ps Marketing Mix framework, the most popular tool of traditional marketing management, and categorizes the main objections of using the model as the foundation of physical marketing. It argues that applying the traditional approach, based on the 4Ps paradigm, is also a poor choice in the case of virtual marketing and identifies two main limitations of the framework in online environments: the drastically diminished role of the Ps and the lack of any strategic elements in the model. Next to identifying the critical factors of the Web marketing, the paper argues that the basis for successful E-Commerce is the full integration of the virtual activities into the company’s physical strategy, marketing plan and organisational processes. The four S elements of the Web-Marketing Mix framework present a sound and functional conceptual basis for designing, developing and commercialising Business-to-Consumer online projects. The model was originally developed for educational purposes and has been tested and refined by means of field projects; two of them are presented as case studies in the paper.

Critical design factors for successful e-commerce systems

The primary goal of this paper is to identify critical design factors that have substantial effects on the performance of e-commerce systems. This paper presents a theoretical model that examines the relationships among detailed design factors, perceived quality level and final performance of e-commerce systems. Two consecutive empirical studies were conducted to verify the theoretical model. Results from these studies reveal that the information phase among four transaction phases was the most influential in the final performance of e-commerce systems. Among the myriad design factors related to the information phase, product-related information, depth and variety of the system structure, variety of list view for products, consistency of product and background presentation, and variety of presentation for product information were all found to be closely related to the perceived quality level. This paper ends with the theoretical and practical implications of the study results.

Towards understanding network relationships in online retailing

This paper views e-commerce (B2C) as a retail innovation that evolves along with newly emerging technological system around the Internet. In the case of e-commerce, this system consists of retailers as adopters and co-developers of technological solutions invented/commercialized by specialists. As part of 'new economy' business practices, what is needed for establishing successful e-commerce venture in terms of tangible resources and competences is not necessarily acquired internally but are coordinated via network relationships. The paper proposes to identify different e-commerce strategies, and outlines the kinds of actors involved in the networks that seem to go along with each strategy. While suggesting that different e-commerce strategies correspond to different networking strategies it points at the importance of relational competences in varying online retailing contexts.

The Importance of Confidence for Success in E-Commerce

E-commerce is growing for several reasons. Despite many advantages there is a dilemma for internet vendors: mistrust. Confidence is an essential requirement for social behavior. Unfortunately uncertainty is particularly large in e-commerce. So firms have to be aware of the necessity and possibilities of building consumer confidence. Many countries recognized the challenge and have founded institutions to promote trust in e-commerce and foster the creation of e-commerce codes of conduct. This paper mentions some of these programs and gives suggestions on how e-business firms can promote their trustability.

Selling online: how to become a successful e-commerce merchant

Selling online: how to become a successful e-commerce merchant

Extracting ontological concepts for tendering conceptual structures

It has been argued that beyond software engineering and process engineering, ontological engineering is the third capability needed if successful e-commerce is to be realized. In our experience of building an ontological-based tendering system, we face the problem of building an ontology. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build ontologies in the tendering domain. The ontology life cycle is identified. Extracting concepts from existing resources like on-line catalogs is described. We have reused electronic data interchange (EDI) to build conceptual structures in the tendering domain. An algorithm to extract abstract ontological concepts from these structures is proposed.

Providing A High-Performing Commerce Site

Noting that an efficient and scalable environment is key to success in E-commerce, this article discusses the importance of Web site performance and the ability of a site to scale in relation to the load placed upon it. the article then introduces the performance management life cycle, discussing the steps: understanding customer behavior, determining site performance goals, planning the infrastructure, building and tuning, benchmarking performance, tuning the infrastructure, setting operations, and adjusting for peak periods.

Internet-based e-shopping and consumer attitudes: an empirical study

This paper analyses consumer attitudes towards Internet-based e-shopping. It aims to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded initial reference position, against which later research can explore and interpret the effects of changes in variables representing consumer preferences and shifts in these preferences on the success or failure of B2C e-commerce over the Internet. Because of the opportunity to sample at the outset and of ceteris paribus conditions following from the tendency for other factors such as e-transactions cost to remain small and constant, Singapore data were employed. Regression analysis shows that the life content of products, transactions security, price, vendor quality, IT education and Internet usage significantly affect the initial willingness of Singaporeans to e-shop on the Internet. Generalising, we suggest that Internet-based B2C e-commerce can profitably be introduced or promoted along similar dimensions in socio-geographically and technologically similar situations.

Dominant factors impacting the development of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in agriculture

There is still much optimism about the potential success of e-commerce in agriculture. Three dominant factors have impacted this development: (1) industry structure; (2) product complexity; and (3) the high-touch nature of transactions. In turn, these factors have led to several different potential types of strategic options. From a mix of these strategic options, potential scenarios have been analyzed and selected. These potential scenarios are the future of business-to-business (B2B) commerce in agriculture.

The Supply Chain Critical Link to E-Commerce Success: An Indian Scenario

Based on the survey carried out by Management Development Institute, Gurgaon and KPMG India, the paper suggests a framework to utilise supply chain management as key to success for e-commerce, business-to-business and business-to-commerce ventures. The paper also concluded that the success will lie to those companies who will be able to tailor its physical and information supply chain to the e-commerce application for fulfilment of customer demand and effective and efficient flow of information, material and cash among supply chain members and intra-organisational departments.

Benutzbare Sicherheit — Herausforderungen und Modell für E-Commerce-Systeme

The guarantee of security and privacy is the crucial factor for the success of e-commerce. Up to now, security tools for expressing the individual interests of security and privacy in a simple way are lacking or not suitable for every user. This article discusses the reasons why user interfaces are not usable and shows new designing concepts for user-friendly security software. By means of a model, based on Petri-nets, it is illustrated, how these concepts are realized in a practical way.

Analysis of optimal thread pool size

The success of e-commerce, messaging middleware, and other Internet-based applications depends in part on the ability of network servers to respond in a timely and reliable manner to simultaneous service requests. Multithreaded systems, due to their efficient use of system resources and the popularity of shared-memory multi-processor architectures, have become the server implementation of choice. However, creating and destroying a thread is far from free, requiring run-time memory allocation and deallocation. These overheads become especially onerous during periods of high load and can be a major factor behind system slowdowns. A thread-pool architecture addresses this problem by prespawning and then managing a pool of threads. Threads in the pool are reused, so that thread creation and destruction overheads are incurred only once per thread, and not once per request. However, efficient thread management for a given system load highly depends on the thread pool size, which is currently determined heuristically. In this paper, we characterize several system resource costs associated with thread pool size. If the thread pool is too large, and threads go unused, then processing and memory resources are wasted maintaining the thread pool. If the thread pool is too small, then additional threads must be created and destroyed on the fly to handle new requests. We analytically determine the optimal thread pool size to maximize the expected gain of using a thread.

Five steps to unlocking a Web site's potential

Companies such as Amazon.com and Dell Computers have experienced financial success in e-commerce by studying their users' human factors. Implementing a five-step process in developing their sites helped these companies ensure customer satisfaction: determine the functional level; determine the task flow level; design the high-level architecture; test the detailed design; and measure user satisfaction.

LSMAC: An improved load sharing network service dispatcher

The rapid growth of the Internet is changing the way we do business. Electronic Commerce (or E-Commerce) is already a reality and will expand rapidly in the near future. However, the success of E-Commerce depends heavily on the scalability and availability of the servers. Cluster-based servers using commodity hardware have been accepted as a good alternative to expensive specialized hardware for building scalable services. In this paper, we summarize the two clustering architectures: IP-based clustering and MAC-based clustering. A new efficient implementation of the MAC-based clustering architecture is presented and its performance in clustering Web servers was measured using the WebStone benchmark and was found to be superior to that of existing MAC-based clustering implementations.