The face of eCommerce

1
The face of eCommerce

• The popular image of eCommerce is that of a
  splashy web page, full of products and
  advertisements.  In fact, that web page is the
  public façade of a remarkable system that
  connects front-end presentation of products and
  services, personalized to user preferences, to a
  back-end of databases used to manage product
  inventories, customer profiles, transaction
  histories, payments, and more. 

2
eC

• The definition of eCommerce is
• the conduct of commerce via digital means, as
  in the buying and selling of goods and services
  on-line.

3
eC defined

• The U.S. Census Bureau defines Electronic
  Commerce as the sales of goods and services
  where an order is placed by the buyer or the
  price and terms of sale are negotiated over an
  Internet, extranet, Electronic Data Interchange
  (EDI) network, electronic mail, or other online
  system payment may or may not be made
  on-line.1
• 1 U.S. Department of Commerce, May 2002.

4

• By these definitions, virtually all commercial
  activity could soon be categorized as eCommerce.

5
eC

• The U.S. Bureau of the Census has embarked on a
  major program to map and measure the digital
  economy. A position paper entitled Measuring
  Electronic Business describes the official
  measurement framework, defines terms, and
  outlines sample statistical data formats.

6

• The framework and datasets from the U.S.
  Manufacturing sector (from 98 to 00) that
  follow the government model can be found
• at http//www.census.gov/eos/www/ebusiness614.htm
  

7
Electronic Commerce

• is alive and well, and growing rapidly, in
  spite of the dot com market phenomenon of too
  much money chasing too few financial
  opportunities.

8
eC

• The real story of Electronic Commerce lies
  somewhere between revolution and evolution.
  Revolution, whereby new services emerge and
  entire economic sectors are transformed, and
  evolution, whereby existing businesses can adapt
  and adopt the new approaches as part of ongoing
  development and self-assessment.

9
eC

• Commerce was not a design goal or even a remote
  consideration of the early Internet.  We have
  moved from an environment that emphasized casual
  communication and file sharing to one that
  supports the electronic transfer of funds, and
  the expectations have changed accordingly

10

• We have moved from an environment that emphasized
  casual communication and file sharing to one that
  supports the electronic transfer of funds, and
  the expectations have changed accordingly. In an
  on-line banking application, 99 reliability is
  just not good enough.

11
eC

• What we are observing is a fascinating, historic
  high-stakes technical re-tooling of the
  underlying protocols and practices of the
  Internet to support robust and secure digital
  transactions, and their use within routine human
  activities in business, government, education,
  and beyond.

12
eC

• There is now a demand for technologies that
  support comprehensive user authentication,
  encrypted communication, and digital
  certification that provably connects people to
  on-line actions.  The subsequent need to balance
  the required security with an acceptable level of
  privacy remains as a challenge.  How much privacy
  are users willing to sacrifice in exchange for
  security and convenience features?

13
eC

• The permeation of Information Technologies
  throughout the eCommerce transaction and the
  internal business practices of the organization
  have become more generally known as eBusiness. 
  The evolution of these technologies, ranging from
  integrity checks and fraud detection to
  information extraction, will be investigated in
  this course.