BUS 270: Information and Communication Infrastructure
Project 1: Internet Services and Electronic Commerce

I took the Information and Communication Infrastructure class during the Fall of 2003. This class was
a requirement for the Pre-Business curriculum for the Haworth College of Business.

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As part of a requirement for this class, I had to write a summary about one of the projects I completed in class and post it on my electronic porfolio. I chose to write a summary on Project 1: Internet Services and Electronic Commerce. Out of the several projects I had to do, I feel that the knowledge I gained from this project will benefit me most in the future.

The Internet Services and Electronic Commerce project was a group project. For each of the four sections of the project, we were given a list of four criteria to evaluate the websites. We then had to rank each website on a scale of one to five, with five as the highest, on each of the criteria. Following a table that showed our rankings was an explanation of why and how we evaluated each website.

The first section was on Internet Portals. Based on ease of use, content scope, usefulness, and customer service, we evaluated the following three search engines: www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com, and www.google.com.

The next three sections were on Electronic Commerce. Beginning with Business to Consumer e-commerce, we evaluated two music websites on ease of use, security, content scope, and price. In the Consumer to Consumer e-commerce portion, we evaluated www.ebay.com and www.ubid.com on ease of use, content scope, fees, and privacy policy. We compared http://extranet.daimlerchrysler.com with https://fsn.ford.com in the Business to Business e-commerce section. These two extranets were evaluated on ease of use, content scope, security, and customer service.

This project taught me a lot about websites. In order for a business to be sucessful in e-commerce, it must have an effective, user-friendly site for its customers. If a company fails to make an easily accessable website, it could potentially lose business. For instance, when our team evaluated ebay.com and ubid.com, we discovered that ubid.com does not offer as much as ebay.com. We were able to obtain much more information from ebay.com than ubid.com. After comparing the two, as a customer, I would feel more secure using ebay.com, because all of the information I need was available. I would also be able to access much more in terms of products to bid on.

Overall, this was a great project. I learned a lot from this project while having fun at the same time.