Internet Services and

E-Commerce

Project 1

BUS 2700

 MW 2:00 – 3:15P

B2C:

Quang Nguyen

Amy Letzgus

Daniel Jadwin

Stephen Wingard

Mia Soule

Executive Summary

Consumers are demanding higher standards from internet services then ever before.  With the expanding capabilities of the internet, websites are offering consumers more options and content then thought possible only a few years ago.  Internet sites are being asked to provide more in-depth coverage of services, and higher security for purchasing and selling goods.  Websites discussed below were evaluated using the following criteria:     

      Ease of use

      Content scope

      Customer service

      Exclusiveness

      Usefulness

Three of the more commonly used search engines evaluated were Google, Ask Jeeves, and Vivisimo.  Of these three, Google possessed a higher degree of all key aspects being evaluated.  It provided a higher degree of exclusiveness, a greater scope of content and a user friendly approach toward customer service.

The news services evaluated were CNN, NY Times, and Environment News Service.  CNN and NY Times were closely ranked, with both news services providing comprehensive in their news coverage.  However, CNN showed stronger customer support then the other news services.  CNN and NY Times offered more then simple news coverage on their sites.  A valuable service offered to members included e-mail alerts for the latest breaking news.

Internet services will change the lives of people tremendously.  The scope and breadth of the internet has largely remained undiscovered.  Services and information will increasingly be provided and enhanced, giving users an unlimited ability to control their resources directly. 

Automotive research is becoming more detailed and accessible to the general population.  Edmunds, Carsmart, and Cars are three of the sites evaluated in this repot.  Among these three, Edmunds had a clear advantage in ease of use and site content.  With sites such as these three, consumers are finding it easier to research and purchase over the internet. 

Consumers are also finding it easier and more inexpensive to purchase general goods over the internet.  Three sites researched were Amazon, Overstock and Shopping-Bargains.  Overall, these sites provide consumers with the ability to research and purchase items that may not be available locally, or are offered at a cheaper price.  Amazon had superior layout and content and higher security for transactions.  All of which increase a consumers ease in using these services.

On-line Marketplaces such as Ebay, Liquidation, and Onsale provide consumers with a user friendly approach to buying or selling goods.  These sites have increased in popularity over the years due to the increased security of transactions, and ease of use.   Ebay was a clear winner over the other sites evaluated due to their content, layout, and navigation capabilities. 

Covisint, a subsidiary of Compuware Corporation, enhances applications and software of businesses.  Convisint Connect provides industry-focused, high-value business functionality.  Allowing companies to streamline communication channels and provide the tools necessary to interact efficiently with vertical partners.  With Covisint, companies will be able to translate documentation, improve security, and enhance their business relationships with partners.

Business to business e-commerce’s growth is limited only by technological improvements.  The availability of goods and services is expanding rapidly to increase consumer’s power in the purchasing process.  Unfortunately, along with this growth and improvement comes the potential for miss-use.  As improvements are made, stronger attempts to safe guard consumers from fraudulent offers need to be made.  If these are lacking, consumers may find it more beneficial to continue spending their money in traditional “brick and mortar” stores. 

Internet Services

Search Engines

After had closely and carefully evaluated the three website, we came to the conclusion that Google was the best out of the three.  Even though they were all very easy to use, there content was slightly different.  Google and Vivisimo provided more brief detail with its site and the contained information.

Once again, Google and Vivisimo beat Ask Jeeves in providing a good customer support.  It is a lot easier to contact Google and Vivisimo customer service than to contact Ask Jeeves.  Google provided a link to ask for your opinion on how they could improve their site result.  This link can be located at the bottom of the resulting page after you key in your key word and hit enter.  Vivisimo also gave their contact information on their “Contact” link.

Out of the three web sites, Google by far is the most exclusive search engine.  Their resulting page can be link to various related resources.  Their sources of information are extended far beyond image, news, government, business, and sports.  Unlike Ask Jeeves and Vivisimo, Google allows you to connect to larger, more expansive sources when you click on their “more” link.  Despite there slight difference, they all were very helpful resource for internet research.

News Services

The given three new services were: CNN, New York Times, and ENS-News.  Out of the three services, ENS-News was the most difficult one to handle.  Their services are exclusively provided to their registered members.  The stories they provided were short, brief, and in-descriptive.  They do not tell you enough about the event or incident in order for you to get the full picture of the story. 

            We had a very hard time debating between CNN and New York Times because they were extremely similar.  Excluding their layout, the only area we could distinct a difference was in their customer service.  CNN has their “Contact Us” page laid out clearly so that it is easy to contact them on any specific topic.  As stated before, these two sites were extremely similar, their stories were almost about the same topic, and they provided closely identical service just in different names. 

I subscribed to both CNN and New York Time’s “Email Alert.”  The sign up was straight forward and very self-explanatory. Included with the sign-up, the site asks for some basic personal information such as your email address.  This service allows you to get just whatever news you want based on the categories that you select.  The site emails you when there is anything new from those categories and provides you with a clickable link right in the email message that directs you to a more detailed web site. 

Future Prediction

According to the study done by “Pew Internet & The American Life Project” called “The Future of The Internet;” the experts believe that “the internet will be more deeply integrated in our physical environments and high-speed connection will proliferate – with mixed result.”   As the result of this study, some valuable conclusions have been drawn.  Fifty-nine percent of the experts agreed on the prediction that “more government and business surveillance will occur as computing devices proliferate.”  The vast majority also agreed that virtual-classes and home-schooling will expand due to the result of internet.  There was also little disagreement when the topic of more broadband connection will replace dial-up.  On the negative side; some of these experts also worried that there will be “at least one devastating attack will occur in the next 10 years on the network information infrastructure or the country’s power grid.”

            As of our team prediction, we strongly believe that the internet will change our life tremendously.  Just by evaluating the services and businesses available on the web currently, we envision that in the near future, our life will largely depend on the internet.  The internet will enable us to have the “power” at our fingers’ tips.  People can listen to their favorite music anywhere they go; there will be live weather forecast and sport show on their personal computer.  Millions of business transactions will be done instantly online because there will be less paperwork to do and it will be most convenient to shop at home with fast delivery service. Email and instant message program such as MSN, AIM, YIM will continue to keep people in touch with their family and friends no matter where they are in the world.  There will be more virtual business conferences where intelligent minds can share their ideas and thoughts instantly with their colleagues.  The internet has brought us countless benefits and with this, our lives will be heavily dependent on it in the near future.  

Automobile Research

In my assessment of these websites it became very clear that Edmunds was the best in every category although it was tied for best in a few of them. The layout was much more fluid and colorful with helpful graphical navigation tabs. Cars also has a good structure, using graphical tabs like Edmunds but was not quite as polished. Carsmart was a completely different website and although it might have even had better information inside the interface looked like it had been designed in a high school html class; there was very little use of graphics and extensive use of plain text that would deter most viewers. Both Edmunds and Cars used similar dropdown menus to navigate through the website efficiently, once again Carsmart lagged behind in overall polish. The privacy policy that Edmunds and Carsmart both used was the well known and trusted TRUSTe privacy seal which is the standard for privacy policies and although Cars had a good policy of their own it does not match up. In my search through the websites I looked for two things involving customer service, a contact section and a help section. Edmunds had both of these sections while Cars only had a contact section and Carsmart only had a help section that I was able to find. Neither of these websites included any private members only sections the only difference I could find between them was the fact that at Edmunds and Carsmart you are able to create a username and save your past researches and sign up for newsletters. On these websites you have no reason to give out any personal information of any kind that would require security but Edmunds wins again. Edmunds scores highest because during the sign in part of the website that allows you to personalize your site it does include 256 bit encryption. Cars does not have a section to allow you to enter any of your info and has no reason for security and therefore does not include it so I gave them a fairly low score. Carsmart has a section for you to input your name and info to create a personal section of the site and includes no encryption for this which is why they get the lowest score.

E-Merchandise Retailers

Amazon and Overstock have very similar user interfaces but Overstock was a little more cluttered leading Amazon to win the ease of use section. Shopping-Bargains seemed like it was a completely different type of website with a much less user friendly interface which is probably why we have all heard of Amazon and Overstock but not Shopping-Bargains. Of all three sites none used the TRUSTe standard that was shared by two of the car sites but had fairly extensive policies none the less except for Shopping-Bargains which was literally two paragraphs explaining a few things and telling you to call them if you want to know anymore. Both Amazon and Overstock are high budget companies now and therefore did have the necessary customer service help and contact sections that a large company must have to succeed and it was again obvious why Shopping-Bargains does not have enough money for super bowl commercials. Amazon has a very advanced target marketing system that remembers what you have looked at and recommended appropriate products. I am not sure if Overstock does this also but their commercials are very specifically targeting people who know what the big O is. Amazon fell behind in the security section due to their relatively lax 128 bit encryption. Overstock wins this battle and Shopping-Bargains looses because they do not actually sell things they send you to other websites to buy things and they rely on them having security.

Auction Sites

The given three services were: Ebay, Liquidation.com. and Onsale.com. Out of these three services, liquidation was the most difficult to handle.  The site was very difficult to navigate through and the color scheme was unattractive.  Unlike Ebay and Onsale.com, Liquidation.com lacked the appeal needed to make us as viewers feel comfortable and relaxed. With this, we found the provided categorical tabs useless when attempting to locate desired products. 

As shown from the total column, Ebay and Onsale.com were very close in ratings.   Ebay was viewed as the most polished compared to Onsale.com and Liquidation.com. The site possessed a browser category which made navigation and the selection of products easy.  A specialty listing was included along with detail listing of production under categories column.

Compared to Onsale.com, Ebay lacked the depiction of a main customer service hotline.  If Ebay had presented a main service contact number, it most likely would have earned a higher rating. 

 Covisint

Covisint is a subsidiary of Compuware Corporation and its focus is providing industry high-value business functionality. It is a fast and quick way to access business software or enterprise applications. Covisint Connect provides advanced document routing and delivery services to and from all your trading partners, along with sophisticated any-to-any document translation capability designed to handle both EDI and XML technologies interchangeably in one environment. Covisint Connect is simple and cost-effective to deploy wherever you are in the supply chain. Along with the messaging service, Covisint provides industry-focused, high-value business functionality. Covisint “business now” services offer fast, flexible, economic alternatives to conventional business software or enterprise applications.

Covisint has been constantly trying to solve the problems of the automotive industry. They believe that organizations today trade electronic documents with many different trading partners often in different industry verticals like Manufacturing, Health Care, Logistics and Finance. As a company, their solution is to implement Covisint Connect which provides the tools and services for dealing with multiple trading partners electronically. This includes a wide array of communications channels, translators, management and security tools to perform all of your message routing and delivery per industry vertical per trading partner. This hopefully will force companies to realize the cost savings with Covisint and reduce complexity as Covisint Connect manages all of your document translations.

Future Prediction

As technology continues to grow with each day, the business to business e-commerce abundance is growing alongside it. Anything you could possibly want or need is available on the internet, but it is all too typical of Americans to take advantage of this availability. According to a recent article on Information Week Online, EBay Inc. could face a major change of its business model, if it loses a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit by Tiffany & Co., which claims the online marketplace has failed to take adequate steps to remove fake Tiffany jewelry from the site. (Gonsalves 2006)  The article written by Gonsalves on January 30, is a good illustration of what the future holds for e-commerce. The access to commerce on the internet has become too easy that even eBay is taking advantage of the availability by lying to people about their merchandise. If one of the biggest merchants of e-commerce is beginning to find easier and cheaper ways out, who’s to say that smaller merchants won’t follow their lead. I believe this to be the beginning of a downward spiral of the popularity and integrity of e-commerce. I do believe that the items available will continue to grow but the amount of money earned and the amount of people that swear by e-commerce will start to decrease.
 

Individual Project Assessments

Quang Nguyen

The major focus of this project was on the internet.  It's amazing to think how much this technology has expanded in even the last ten years.   There are more and more businesses appear on the Word Wide Web.  Since the last two year, I did a lot of my shopping online so this project really beneficial to me, it helped me to understand more about those e-retailers.   My part was comparing the difference search engine.  It is pretty amazing to see how similar site can be so different in term of what type of information they provided.  

Mia Soule

Evaluating website services and navigation gave a better understanding of how the internet has affected consumers and businesses. This project helped define the differences between an exceptional website from the average, and helped show the characteristics needed to reach this.   It also gave a better understanding of the scope and depth of information present on the internet.  From services offered, to types of security for on-line purchases, there is more to a good website then simple layout.   I found this project has reiterated to me the growing power of the internet in the average person's life style.

Amy Letzgus 

      I felt Project 1 was a fitting project to be assigned first because we learned what resources are available for anyone interested in learning more about business. The workload was not too difficult and it was easy to divide the assignments equally among the group. All in all, I learned a lot from the questions I was assigned and felt the project meshed well with the topics discussed in class.

Stephen Wingard

            With this project, I learned the importance of a website possessing an attractive site. A website that is hard to navigate and which is unattractive in regards to color scheme, will most likely cause viewers to leave that particular site.  If consumers find difficulty navigating through a businesses site, it is highly likely that business will suffer in sales or service. 

With evaluating my assigned websites, I was able to locate negative and positive factors which affect businesses that operate via internet. If websites do not provide helpful resources for using its site, it is most likely customers will choose another  website which provides these resources.  In closing, what I obtained from this project is the importance a site providing helpful links and inviting color schemes.  

Daniel Jadwin

In this project I learned how big the differences are between a large website service and a smaller one and what makes them so different. The main reason I see that Amazon sells hundreds of millions of dollars of merchandise while smaller companies such as Shopping-Bargains and millions of others is the layout. It is obvious that Overstock realized this was at least part of the reason for the success of Amazon while so many other companies failed during the time it was starting and copied much of the interface if not directly, they at least took direct influence in their production of an interface. Of the car sites it is obvious that the better the interface is and the easier and more friendly it is the more its name gets out and therefore the larger it gets. The big ones, Cars.com and Edmunds.com are on a completely different level as lesser known Carsmart.com and I believe that this is the reason that they have become the big ones instead of staying in the dark.

References

Anderson, J.Q., Fox, S., Rainie, L. “The Future of the Internet,”

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/145/report_display.asp, Retrieved (06 Feb 2006).

Gonsalves, A.  “EBay Faces Groundbreaking Case In Tiffany   

           Counterfeit Suit,” InformationWeekOnline., Retrieved (06 Feb. 2006).

www.covisint.com Retrieved (08 Feb. 2006).