MIS 712 E Business Strategies

Articulate the recent developments in e-business industry and its likely future directions.

2. Develop the ability to work independently and contribute as a member of team employing appropriate interpersonal, professional and technical communication skills.
3. 6. Interpret the legal, ethical, social and cultural issues that affect the use, design, and implementation of e-business systems.    

Development of the mobile web site and building mobile applications

Today development is taking place across the world. Similarly development of the mobile web site and building mobile applications is increasing day by day. There are different types of m-commerce software used by the company to develop a mobile website. M-commerce software includes a mobile web site, mobile web app, native app and hybrid app. The companies have to plan and build a mobile presence.  If a business select Mobile web site or web app it will be less expensive as compared to the other (Yamagata, Coppola, Kowtko, and Joyce, 2013). The company can also select native app which is a device hardware it can be used by a customer if he/she is offline.

Development of mobile website is not easy to be done. To conduct this procedure company need to plan. Planning of mobile website is done by the company considering the objective and goals of the company (Pink, 2016). The company needs to fetch the required information to accomplish the procedure of the planning of the mobile website. Mobile web site is only possible because of the use of the advanced technologies by the company. Mobile website enhances the convenience of the customers for making payments and checking details on a website. There is a development of some of the unique features that are must to take care while designing a mobile web (Jobe, 2013). These features need to take care by the company for achieving the activity efficiently and effectively.

Feature                         Implications for mobile platforms

Development of the mobile website is not an easy task to be performed. Design of the mobile sites plays an important role. The design consideration includes platform constraints, mobile first design, responsive web design, and adaptive web design. The design consideration includes responsive web design (RWD) and adaptive web design (AWD). RWD helps the CSS site to adjust the layout of a site that needs to be done according to device screen resolutions. On the other hand, AWD serves delivers unique and numerous templates or versions of the site that optimized for the device.  

Mobile app development also consists of cross platform tool. C and Java are used for developing a mobile app. There is a presence of some low-cost open source that includes Appery.io, Codiqa, PhoneGap, MoSync, Appcelerator. Business tries to provide a mobile website to the customers that are basically the resizing of existing app (Iacob, Harrison, and Faily, 2013). For the development of the mobile web app companies can utilize browser API. The most expensive app is a Native app which is generally avoided by the company as it requires more programming.

E-commerce payment system 

E-commerce payment system is becoming convenient for customers. The most common mode of making the online payment is credit and debit cards in the US. Some other Electronic payment modes consist of a smart card, E-money, Electronic Fund transfer, visa checks out, WUpay, Dwolla, etc. (Rodriguez, Smith, and Spinac, 2014).

There are certain limitations of credit card payment that includes the security risk, cost and social equity (Roy, and Venkateswaran, 2014). The image talks about the working of the online transactions. The process of making the online payment starts with the customer who purchases a product. It also ends with the customers when a customer pay monthly instalment to the merchant bank. In this process, consumer made a purchase from the merchant trader through the internet (i.e. online payment). The merchant contacts the clearing house for the payment, the bank works as a clearing house. Clearing house verifies the account and balance with issuing bank. Issuing bank credits merchant account and at the same time takes monthly statement issued with debt for purchase.  

The customer uses mobile phones as payment devices; which is basically established in Europe and Asia. It is expanding in the US; a customer is making payments with the use of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Pay Pal, Android Pay, and Square. Mobile or social peer-to-peer payment systems can be done. Digital cash and virtual currencies can be utilized by the company. For instance, Bitcoin is generated which can be used by the companies in the real world. Linden dollar can be used for purchasing virtual goods. EBPP (electronic billing presentment and payment) model can be used by customers (Dillman, Smyth, and Christian, 2014).

To safeguard the payment e-business Companies follows certain security measures that ensure the customer's details are in safe hand. Encryption, digital signature, and security certificated measured used by the company. This makes sure that the details are safe, authentic and verified. The most common way of making payment is credit card and debit card in e-business. In credit card, the bank pays on the behalf of customers which customers have to repay to them on time. On the other hand in the debit card whatever payment made amount gets deducted from the customer’s account. Nowadays, Electronic Fund transfer and e-money are becoming popular. E-business follows security protocol to ensure the security of the authentication, encryption, integrity, and non-reputability of the transactions taking place. The major threat to the e-commerce environment is security. Most common threats include hacking, cyber vandalism and data breach.

The security plan should be managed by the company for enhancing the customer satisfaction. To avoid the risk in the payment procedure Company implement the security policy. The implementation of the plan may include the security from the organization side; access should only be given to the authentic people. The company can make the use of the biometrics for enhancing the security. Authorization policies along with the authorization management systems are required in an organization.

Private and public cooperation need to take care of the laws and policy related to the US-CERT and Homeland Security Act. There are some of the laws that give authorities tools for identifying tracing, prosecuting cyber criminals. These laws are USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act.

B2C Business Models and B2B Business Models 

The most common business model that is used by the companies includes B2B model and B2C model. The business model B2B defines when the product directly sold to an intermediate to make it available for final customers. It includes E-distributor, E-procurement, exchange, and Industry consortium net marketplaces.  B2C; The deal conducted directly with the customer. The website offers service variety of products and services, and then the customer’s select- place and order which company delivers to the customer directly (Guo, Wei, Sharma, and Rong, 2017). These models have a different role in the e-business industry. E-commerce business models are categorized into e-commerce sectors and technology. Companies like e-bay use multiples business models. B2C business models consist of E-trailer, community provider, content provider, etc.

E-trailer; it is basically known as an online version of a traditional retailer. The merchant included are a virtual merchant, bricks and click, catalog merchant and manufacturer-direct (Hartmann, Zaki, Feldmann, and Neely, 2014). Community provider defines as the social network where people having a similar interest can share the information. Revenue models in this community include typically hybrid, combining advertising, etc. content provider; it includes the content which is available in the form of news, music, video, etc. portal; it includes combine a package of the content and services. Businesses earn revenue through advertising, referral fees and transaction fees. Transaction broker is used by the industries like finance, travel and job placement. These industries earn revenue through transaction fees (Gilani, 2017).

A market creator is a most common model that is used by the companies like eBay, Priceline, etc. there are some businesses like Google, that adopt a model of a service provider which is basically to provide services to the customers. These models create an impact on processes and outcomes of the organizations. The organization makes some strategies according to the business model and a different model is suitable for different industries.

The B2B business model includes different net marketplaces such as e-distributor, E-procurement, Exchange, and industry consortium. In B2B business there is a presence of private industrial network (Reim, Parida, and Örtqvist, 2015). Taking about B2B e-distributor it includes the retail and wholesale store. For instance, Grainger is leading company who work as an e-distributor. E-procurement includes the digital market where a customer can transact for indirect goods. For example – Ariba whose revenue model is a service fee, supply chain management, and fulfillment services. Exchange model of business creates competition between the suppliers which lead to drop in the number of exchanges dramatically.

Exchanges business model will help companies to earn profit through transaction and commission fees. Industry consortia is one of the business models which is more successful than exchanges. This model is sponsored by powerful industry players and that strengthen traditional purchasing behavior. SupplyOn is an example of this model. The businesses need to adapt either B2B business model or B2C business model according to the industries they can make an effective choice. According the strategic goals and objectives company can easily decide which business models they need to select for their business activities.

Databases 

Database plays an important role in storing, recording the required details. Every company maintains a team who take care of the database management system. There is software that is used by the company to create, maintain and access databases (Minker, 2014). Storing data and Attributes Company can use database management system which helps to maintain and create an effective data. SQL (Structured Query Language) is an industry standard database query and manipulation languages that are used in a relational database. The data in the relational database can be represented as two-dimensional tables. The tables should be organized in rows and attributes in columns (Varian, 2014). The research team can implement the data mining technics which is used to find the patterns in data, a model behavior of customers. On the basis of this company will try to implement new technology.

Companies give important to the research, company implement the plans after doing research on plans formed. Technical Research skills include a finding of the information, facts, etc. based on the technologies implemented by the competitors (Al-Nuaimi, Mohamed, and Alekam, 2017). The research makes it easier for the company to evaluate by seeing the graphical presentation of the existing and emerging technologies used by the e-businesses. They make the user interface easier for the top management so that they can easily step up towards the opportunities. This reduces the time of the top management in understanding the figures and facts. The research team can give technical advice to the top management related the technologies.

The data collected by the research team include the authentic sources. This becomes the competitive advantage for the companies. The research team uses data warehouses and data mining for making the data easily available to the companies. Data warehouse collect firm's transactions and customer data in a single location for offline analysis by marketers and site managers (Kimball, and Ross, 2013). Data mining is an analytical technique to find out the patterns in data, a behaviour of customers and it develops customer profiles. Data mining is based on different models that are query-driven data mining, model-driven data mining and rule-based data mining. These data mining helps the research team to perform the research.  

The research executive should know how to implement the Hadoop to make the research effective. Technical research on the big data is one the leading challenge. Challenges that might be faced by the technical researcher includes web traffic, e-mail, social media, traditional DBMS, etc. the researcher should have the skills to deal with the challenges. The research executive should know how to implement the Hadoop to make the research effective. Hadoop is an open source software solution which can be used by the company for processing data. This Hadoop helps in data distributing processing (Dagade, Lagali, Avadhani, and Kalekar, 2015). Research generally includes big data that is difficult to manage and store. Challenges that might be faced by the technical researcher includes web traffic, e-mail, social media, traditional DBMS, etc. the researcher should have the skills to deal with the challenges. Each and every company manage database so that the top level management can easily access the required data from the data base.

Local and location-based marketing 

The local and location based marketing concept are increasing day by day. Location based marketing enables the users to target the audience based on the location. Marketing is done by the company on basis of the locations of the users. The company also provide some facilities to the users who are based on locations. These services include personal navigation, point-of-interest, reviews and friend-finders (Strauss, 2016). This is the tendency of consumers to respond to a local advertisement. Prior to 2005, all the local advertising was non-digital. Google map helps in targeting advertisements after identifying the geographic locations. After 2007, targeting ads on the based on GPS through smartphones was also possible. After seeing the growth of the location based mobile marketing it is expected that the growth will be triple over next five years.

The image clearly talks about the local marketing data that is $ 36 billion and mobile marketing is $ 28.7 billion and location based (local) marketing is approximate $ 6.6 billion. There are different local based marketing platforms available that include Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Yp and some others. The platform Google includes Android OS, Google Maps, Google Places, AdMob, Adwords. Similarly, Apple includes iOS and iAd. There are basically two types of location based marketing techniques. This includes geo-aware techniques and proximity marketing. Geo-aware techniques help in identifying the user's device and target ads and other actions that are going to take place according to the location. Another technique is proximity marketing which is used to identify a perimeter around a location and target ads within the certain perimeter. Location can be identifying with the use of GPS signals, Cell-tower locations, and Wi-Fi locations.

Local mobile is attractive to marketers, the reason being that mobile users are more active. Location based marketing tools can be used by the company. There are different location based considerations available considering the target market. The target market is based on the demographic. Online Marketing and advertising are one of the ways to communicate (Okoe, and Boateng, 2015). There are different online platforms through which communication can be done. This helps in enhancing the communication skills of marketing (Koprowska, 2014). Smartphones are used by the 80% of the U.S users to search local products and services. 50% of the users visit a store within 1 day of local search and 18% make a purchase. This data clearly shows that the local mobile is attractive to marketers. Mobile users are more active and that is a reason they are ready to purchase than desktop users.

Some of the other companies use location based marketing tools that include geo-social based services marketing, location-based services marketing, mobile-local social network marketing, proximity marketing, In-store messaging and location-based app messaging. These tools of marketing are used by for different purposes (Ström, Vendel, and Bredican, 2014). Location based considerations include the action-based, time-restrained offers and opportunities. This consideration considers target demographic and location-aware mobile users based on demographics. After the consideration, it is a time to find out the marketing results. Metrics can be used by the company for measuring unique characteristics such as Reservations, click-to-call, friend, and purchase.

Online retail sector 

Online retain sector is connecting people wither offline or online. Retail industry consists of 7 segments that include clothing, durable goods, etc. because of these facility people like to buy a product online. The customer can order the products either on email or on the telephone which is basically related to the online purchasing (Laudon, and Traver, 2013). The online sector today is growing much faster than the offline segments. Revenue of the companies shows the growth of the company. Over 75% of the internet users bought products online in the year 2015. The basic aim behind this is to reduce the search and transaction cost. In the online relating sector there is less or low threat of new entries. The online retail sector revenue is growing continuously. The revenue from the offline segments is increasing. Amazon is included in pure play online retailers.

SOURCES:  Based on data from Internet Retailer, 2015; eMarketer, Inc. 2015y

The image throws light on the growth of the online retail in the US. Apparel and accessories show the growth that is approximately 18.6%. The next position in the growth is occupied by computers and electronics.

The graphical representation shows the growth in online retail in terms of the revenues. In the year 2019, it is expected that online retail business will register a growth of $535. Similarly, in the year 2018, it is expected to be $482. Online retail today plays a vital role in enhancing the growth social e-commerce growth of the company. Location based marketing of local goods and services supports online retail. Rapid growth in the mobile platforms like tablets works as a shopping machine for the companies (Mitchell and Page, 2015). Omnichannel integration includes the integration of the web operation with traditional physical web store operations.

There is two business analysis approaches available that include the strategic analysis and financial analysis. The strategic analysis focuses on both industry as a whole and firm itself. Financial analysis throws light on how a firm is performing. Strategic factors include Barriers to entry, power of suppliers, a power of customers, and an existence of substitute products, industry value chain and nature of intra-industry competition. Firm-specific factors include firm value chain, core competencies, synergies, and technology, social and legal challenges.

These are some of the factors that may create an impact on the strategic goals and objectives of the company (Rothaermel, 2015). Company’s financial analysis includes the statements of operations that include revenue, cost of sales, gross margin, operating expenses, operating margin and net margin. These factors may impact the financial analysis of the company. The financial analysis also includes balance sheet of the company. One side of the balance sheet talks about the assets, currents assets, working capital and other side talk about the liabilities, current liabilities, and long-term debt (Vogel, 2014). The growth and development are taking place in the online retail sector. There are some of the factors that may affect the firm.

References 

Laudon, K.C. and Traver, C.G., 2013. E-commerce. Pearson.

Mitchell, A. and Page, D., 2015. State of the news media 2015. Pew Research Center, 29.

Rothaermel, F.T., 2015. Strategic management. McGraw-Hill Education.

Vogel, H. L. (2014). Entertainment industry economics: A guide for financial analysis. Cambridge University Press.