Q1: What is e-commerce? Explain.

The use of internet and the Web to transact business. More formally, digitally enabled commercial transactions between and among organizations and individuals.

Q2:What are eight key elements of a business model? Explain.

1- Value Proposition: How a company's product or service fulfills the needs of customers. Typical E-commerce value propositions include personalization, customization, convenience, and reduction of product search and price delivery cost.
2- Revenue Model: How the company plans to make money from its operations. Major E-commerce revenue models include the advertising model, subscription model, transaction fee model, sales model, and affiliate model.

3- Market Opportunity: The revenue potential within a company’s intended market-space.
4- Competitive Environment: The direct and indirect competitors doing business in the same market-space, including how many there are and how profitable they are.
5- Competitive Advantage: The factors that differentiate the business from its competition, enabling it to provide a superior product at a lower cost.
6- Market Strategy: The plan a company develops that outlines how it will enter a market and attract customers.
7- Organizational Development: The process of defining all the functions within a business and the skills necessary to perform each job, as well as the process of recruiting and hiring strong employees.
8- Management Team: The group of individuals retained to guide the company’s growth and expansion.

Q3: 3- Describe the differentiation of e-commerce and e-business?

- E-commerce primarily involves transactions that cross firm boundaries.
- E-business primarily involves the application of digital technologies to business processes within the firm.

Q4: 4-What are some of the unique features of e-commerce technology? Explain.

1- Ubiquity: Available just about everywhere, at all times, making it possible to shop from your desktop, at home, at work, or even from your car.
2- Global reach: Permit commercial transactions to cross cultural and national boundaries far more conveniently and cost-effectively that is true in traditional commerce.
3- Universal standards: Shard by all nations around the world. In contrast, most traditional commerce technologies differ from one nation to the next.
4- Richness: Refers to the complexity and content of a message. It enables an online merchant to deliver marketing message with text, video, and audio to an audience of millions, in a way not possible with traditional commerce technologies such as radio, television, or magazines.
5- Interactivity: Allows for two-way communication between merchant and consumer and enabling the merchant to engage a consumer in ways similar to a face-to-face experience, but on a much more massive, global scale.
6- Information density: Is the total amount and quality of information available to all market participants. The internet reduces information collection, storage, processing, and communication cost while increasing the currency, accuracy and timeliness of information.
7- Personalization and Customization: Merchant can target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person’s name, interest, and past purchase. The result is a level of personalization and customization unthinkable with existing commerce technologies.
8- Social technology: Provides a many-to-many model of mass communications. Millions of users are able to generate content consumed by millions of other users. The result is the formation of social networks on a wide scale and the aggregation of large audiences on social network platforms.

Q5: 5- What are the major types of e-commerce? Explain and give the example.

- Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-commerce: Online business selling to individual consumers.
Ex. eBay is a general merchandiser that sells consumer products to retail consumers.
- Business-to-Business (B2B) E-commerce: Online business selling to other business.
Ex. Food-trader is an independent third-party commodity exchange, auctions provider, and market information source that serves the food and agricultural industry.
- Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) E-commerce: Consumer selling to other consumers.
Ex. On a large number of Web auction sites such as eBay, and listing sites such as Craigslist, consumer can auction or sell goods directly to other consumers.
- Peer-to-Peer (P2P) E-commerce: Use of peer-to-peer technology, which enables internet users to share files and computer resources directly without having to go through a central Web server, in E-commerce.
Ex. Bit-Torrent is a software application that permits consumers to share video and other high bandwidth content with one other directly, without the intervention of a market maker as in C2C E-commerce.
- Mobile commerce (M-commerce): Use of wireless digital devices to enable transactions on the Web.
Ex. Wireless mobile devices such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and cell phones can be used to conduct commercial transactions.

Q7: Describe the advantage and disadvantage of online channel?

Advantages
- Lower supply chain costs by aggregating demand at a single site and increasing purchasing power.
- Lower cost of distribution using Web sites rather than physical stores.
- Ability to reach and serve a much larger geographically distributed group of customers.
- Ability to react quickly to customer tastes and demand.
- Ability to change prices nearly instantly.
- Ability to rapidly change visual presentation of goods.
- Avoidance of direct marketing costs of catalogs and physical mail.
- Increased opportunities for personalization, customization.
- Ability to greatly improve information and knowledge delivered to customer.
- Ability to lower consumer’s overall market transaction costs.
Disadvantages
- Consumer concerns about the security of transactions.
- Consumer concerns about the privacy of personal information given to Web sites.
- Delays in delivery of goods when compared to store shopping.
- Consumer concerns about the security of transactions.
- Consumer concerns about the privacy of personal information given to Web sites.
- Delays in delivery of goods when compared to store shopping.

Q8: What are e-commerce retailing visions?

1. Greatly reduced search costs on the Internet would encourage consumers to abandon traditional marketplaces in order to find the lowest prices for goods. First movers who provided low-cost goods and high-quality service would succeed.
   
2. Market entry costs would be much lower than those for physical storefront merchants, and online merchants would more efficient at marketing and order fulfillment than their offline competitors because they had command of the technology.
   

Q9: What are marketing communications in e-commerce?

- Marketing communications have a dual purpose: BRANDING and SALES. - One purpose of marketing communications is to develop and strengthen a firm’s brands by informing consumers about the differentiating features of the firm’s products and services. - Another purpose of marketing communications are used to promote sales directly by encouraging the consumer to buy products. There are a number of different forms of marketing communications: - Banner and rich media/video ads - Interstitial ads - Superstition ads - Paid search engine inclusion and placement - Sponsorships - Affiliate relationships - Direct e-mail marketing - Online catalogs - Offline marketing

G10: What are the key dimensions of e-commerce security?

There are six key dimensions to e-commerce security:
- Integrity
- Non-repudiation
- Authenticity
- Confidentiality
- Privacy
- Availability
Integrity: Ensures that information displayed on a Web site or sent or received via the Internet has not been altered in any way by an unauthorized party.
Non-repudiation: Ensure that e-commerce participants do not deny (repudiate) their online actions.
Authenticity: Verifies an individual’s or business’s identity.
Confidentiality: Determines whether information shared online, such as through e-mail communication or an order process, can be viewed by anyone other than the intended recipient.
Privacy: Deals with the use of information shared during an online transaction consumers want to limit the extent to which their personal information can be divulged to other organizations, while, merchants want to protect such information from falling into the wrong hand.
Availability: Determines whether a Web site is accessible and operational at any given moment.