Rangkuman buku E-commerce (Bab I)

Rangkuman dari buku E-commerce: business, technology, society karangan Kenneth C. Laudon dan Carol Guercio Traver

Rangkuman Bab I

What is E-Commerce?
E-Commerce-The use of the Internet and Web to transact business. Digitally enabled transactions include all transactions mediated by digital technology. For the most part, this means transactions that occur over the Internet and the Web. Coomercial transactions involve the exchangeof value (e.g., money) across organizational or individual boundaries in return for products and services. Exchange of value is important for understanding the limits of e-commerce. Without and exchange of values, no commerce occurs.

Why Study E-Commerce?
Prior to the development of e-commerce, the process of marketing and selling goods was a mass-marketing and sales force-driven process. Consumers were viewed as passive targets of advertising “campaigns” and branding blitzes intended to influence their long-term product perceptions and immidiate purchasing behavior. Selling was conducted in well-insulated “channels.” Consumers were considered to be trapped by geographical and social boundaries, unable to search widely for the best price and quality. Information about prices, costs, and fees could be hidden from the consumer, creating profitable “information asymmetries” for selling firm. Information asymmetry refers to any disparity ini relevant market information among parties in a transaction. It was so expensive to change national or regional prices in traditional retailing (what are called menu costs) that “one national price” was norm, and dynamic pricing to the marketplace-changing prices in real time-was unheard of.

Seven Unique Features of E-Commerce Technology

1. Ubiquity
E-Commerce is ubiquitous, meaning that is it available just about everywhere, at all times
2. Global Reach
E-commerce technology permits commercial transactions to cross cultural and national boundaries far more conveniently and cost effectively than is true in traditional commerce. As a result, the potential market size for e-commerce merchants is roughly equal to the size of world’s online population (over 500 million in 2003, and growing rapidy, according to the Computer Industry Almanac)
3. Universal Standards
One strikingly unusual feature of e-commerce technologies is that the technical standards of the Internet, and therefore the technical standards for conducting e-commerce, are universal standards-they are shared by all nations around the world. In contrast, most traditional commerce technology differ from one nation to the next.
4. Richness
Information richness refer to the complexity and the content of a message (Evan and Wurster, 1997; 1999). The richness of traditional markets make them a powerfull selling or commercial environtment. Prior to the development of the Web, there was a trade-off between richness and rich: the larger the audience reached, the less rich the message.
5. Interactivity
E-commerce technologies are interactive, meaning they allow for two-way communication between merchant and consumer. Interactivity allows an online 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
The Internet and the Web vastly increase information density-the total amount and quality of information available to all market participants, consumers, and merchant alike. E-commerce technologies reduce information collection, storage, processing, and communication costs. At the same time, these technologies increase greatly the currency, accuracy, and timeliness of information-making information more useful and important than ever. As a result, information becomes more plentiful, cheaper, and of higher quality.
7. Personalization/Customization
E-commerce technologies permit personalization: Merchant can target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person’s name, interests, and past purchases. The technology also permits customization-changing the delivered product or service based on a user’s preferences or prior behavior. Given the interactive nature of e-commerce technology, a lot of information about the consumer can be gathered in the marketplace at the moment of purchase. With the increase in information density, a great deal of information about the consumer past purchases and behavior can be stored and used by online merchants.


Types of E-Commerce
There are variety of different types of e-commerce and many different ways to characterize these types.

B2C. The most commonly discussed type of e-commerce is Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce, in which online businesses attempt to reach individual consumers.

B2B. Business-to-Business (B2B) e-commerce, in which businesses focus on selling to other businesses.

C2C. Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) e-commerce provides away for consumer to sell to each other, with the help of an online market maker such as the auction site eBay.

P2P. Peer-to-peer technology enables Internet users to share files and computer resources directly without having to go through a central Web server.

M-commerce. Mobile commerce, or M-commerce, refers to the use of wireless digital devices to enable transactions on the Web.

Understand the visions and forces behind the E-commerce I era
The E-commerce I era was a period of explosive growth in e-commerce, beginning in 1995 with the first widespread use of the Web to advertise products and ending in 2000 with collapse in stock market valuations for dot.com ventures. Among the visions for e-commerce expressed during the period were the following:
• For computer scientists, e-commerce was part of their vision of a universal communications and computing environment that everyone on earth could access with cheap, inexpensive computers.
• For economists, e-commerce raised the realistic prospect of a perfect Bertrand market-where price, cost, and quality information are equally distributed-and friction-free commerce.
• For entrepreneurs and their financial backers, e-commerce represented an extraordinary opportunity to earn far above normal returns on investment. Overall, the E-commerce I period was driven largely by visions of profiting from new technology, with the emphasis on quickly achieving very high market visibility. The source of financing was venture capital funds. The ideology of the period emphasized the ungoverned “Wild West” character of the Web and the feeling that government and courts could not possibly limit or regulate the Internet; there was a general belief that traditional corporations were too slow and bureaucratic, too stuck in the old way of doing business to “get it,” that is, to be competitive in e-commerce.

Understand the success and the failures of E-commerce I.
E-commerce during the E-commerce I era was:
• a technological success, with the digital infrastructure created during the period solid enough to sustain significant growth in e-commerce during the next decade.
• a mixed business success, with significant revenue growth and customer usage, but low profit margins.
E-commerce during E-commerce I era did not:
• fullfill economist’s visions of the perfect Bertrand market and friction-free commerce.
• fullfill the visions of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for first mover advantages, low customer acquisition and retention costs, and low costs of doing business.

Identify several factors that will define the E-commerce II era.
Factor that will define e-commerce over the next five years include the following:
• E-commerce technology will continue to propagate through all commercial activity, with overall revenues from e-commerce, the number of products and services sold over the Web, and the amount of Web traffic all rising.
• E-commerce prices will rise to cover the real cost of doing business on the Web.
• E-commerce margins and profits will rise to levels more typical of all retailers.
• Traditional well-endowed and experienced Fortune 500 companies will play a growing and more dominant role.
• The number of successful e-commerce firms will adopt a mixed “clicks and bricks” strategy.
• Regulation of e-commerce and the Web by government will grow both in the United States and worldwide.

Describe the major themes underlying the study of e-commerce.

E-commerce involves three broad interrelated themes:
• Technology: To understand e-commerce, you need a basic understanding of informatin technologies upon which it is built, including the Internet and the World Wide Web, and a host of complimentary technologies-personal computers, local are networks, client/server computing, packet-switched communications, protocols such as TCP/IP, Web servers, HTML, and relational database among others.
• Business: While technology provides the infrastructure, it is the business applications-potensial for extraordinary returns on investment-that create the interest and excitement in e-commerce. New technologies present businesses and entrepreneurs with new ways of organizing production and transacting business. Therefore, you also need to understand some key business concept such as electronic markets, information goods, business models, firm and industry value chains, industry structure, and consumer behavior in electronic markets.
• Society: Understanding the pressures that global e-commerce places on contemporary society is critical to being successful in the e-commerce marketplace. The primary societal issues are intelectual property, individual privacy, and public policy.

Identify the major academic disciplines contributing to e-commerce research.
There are two primary approaches to e-commerce: technical and behavioral. Each of these approaches is represented by several academic disciplines. On the technical side:
• Computer scientists are interested in e-commerce as an application of Internet technology.
• Management scientists are primarily interested in building mathematical models of business processes and optimizing them to learn how businesses can exploit the Internet to improve their business of operations.
• Information systems professionals are interested in e-commerce because of its implications for firm and industry values chains, industry structure, and corporate strategy.
• Economists have focused on consumer behavior at Web sites, and on the features of digital electronic markets.

On behavioral side:
• Sociologists have focused on studies of Internet usage, the role of social inequality in skewing Internet benefits, and the use of the Web as a personal and group communications tool.
• Finance and accounting scholars have focused on e-commerce firm valuation and accounting practices.
• Management scholars have focused on entrepreneurial behavior and the challenges face by young firms who are required to develop organizational structures in short time spans.
• Marketing scholars have focused on consumer response to online marketing and advertising campaigns, and the ability of firms to brand, segment markets, target audiences, and position products to achieve higher returns on investment.