E-Business 电子商务 There is no universally accepted definition of e-Business, but here we assume

E-Business

电子商务

There is no universally accepted definition of e-Business, but here we assume that it embraces all aspects of buying and selling products and services over a network. The essential characteristics of e-Business are that the dealings between two parties, be it business to consumer or business to business, are online transactions, and that the key commodity being traded is information.

Figure 1 The Essential Elements of an Electronic Business

In effect, we see e-Business as the gateway to a deal—it is a transaction that may, but doesn't necessarily have to, lead to the delivery of a physical product. There are several commonly used names for e-Business, the most popular being e-Commerce and e-Trade. Some of the more academic treatises attempt to distinguish the terms (for instance, e- Commerce is sometimes limited to the buying and selling of goods and the flows of associated information and funds; e-Trade can be viewed as covering only supplier to supplier transactions). We have used such terms as synonyms here, and we take them as referring to the same thing.

Figure 1 gives some idea of how the key elements fit together. It should be said that the perspective is intended to be general, and should fit business to business trade as well as the case where individual consumers interact with an online business. So you can "daisy chain"^[1]the picture, such that someone who takes the role of supplier to one set of customers may also take the role of customer to a different supplier further back in the chain. In any case, they all have to be on a shared network, work from the same catalogue, have some means of delivering goods, and be able to settle up after the transaction.

THE WHISTLE STOP TOUR

So far, we have described e-Business in broad terms as a mass market capability that is enabled by a combination of the Internet's global reach and the vast resources of traditional Information Technology. Given this, it should come as no surprise^[2]that it is a multi faceted beast or, potentially, a many headed monster. Many of those facets are technical, but others are not.

To get a grasp on the overall scope and nature of the e-Business proposition, this section looks at the constituent parts of trading over a network. There is a lot more detail on each of these areas later on. For now, though, we have the surfer's guide.

The Marketplace

Before we think about business, we should first think about the market where that business is conducted. So, what is an electronic market？ It can be viewed as direct parallel of the familiar shop, store or emporium. It is, in essence, a virtual trading area where deals are struck over a network. The "shop front" is the computer and the server is the warehouse. In fact, there is an electronic analogue of virtually all of the items you'd find in a conventional market—including bogus traders, inferior goods and dubious bargains.

The size and scope of the marketplace is, however, a little different from the familiar high street model. In e-Business, unlike many other areas of high technology, size really does not matter. It is quite possible to conduct a large volume of business over a wide area with little overhead. The "information smallholder" can compete on an equal footing with the multinational corporation. In fact, it is often not that easy to distinguish between the two. People who have encountered Amazon. com on the Internet probably have no idea how it compares in size with, say, W. H. Smith, who have bookshops in most large towns in the UK, or Blackwells, who position themselves as global suppliers of academic books^[3].

To be an effective player—as well as the basic technology to enter the market you need a brand, some content, service support and a means of fulfilment (i. e. delivering the goods). This does not imply that all have be owned. An e-Business that looks like a cogent entity to the consumer may in reality be a host of co operating suppliers. One supplier might provide the online content and another the application hosting. The delivery vans might be contracted from the Post Office or Federal Express, and they might deliver a set of products branded by someone completely different. In this respect, the electronic market is a more complex beast than the traditional one of manufacturer, retailer and wholesaler.

Furthermore, the nature of e-Business lends itself to more than one trading model. For instance, the age old idea of a marketplace owned by oneorganisation, populated by authorised traders is quite tenable. This model can be extended to add the idea of having "guilds" that control standards within their particular area.

There are many other trading models, such as conventional auction and then there is barter—e-Business draws on a lot of history! All have their merits and are suitable to a certain type of trading. Most online trading models have a physical dual, some don't.

Whatever the market looks like, it can often becategorised by the dominant party. In seller driven markets, it is the large, dominant vender who sets the price, not really for negotiation; in a buyer driven markets there are many people selling into the market, and a small number of dominant buyers who take best bids, for example, UK supermarkets are often accused of having undue influence—downwards—on the price of agricultural produce. It iS these dynamics that determine the appropriate technology for e-Business. There are also open markets in which the buyer and seller negotiate, or a free market, where the behaviour of the market itself sets prices. Insurance brokering is an example of this, as are the optimization packages used for pricing and selling airline seat capacity.

e-Shops

The electronic shop can be thought of as the "look and feel^[4]" of the screen that fronts the customer. Just as with high street stores, the aim is to entice the customer to browse and ultimately, to buy.

Although unlikely to supplant real world shops, the online variety can provide features that seem likely to promote their growth. As well as being readily available and easy to search, they can provide some measure of masscustomisation. For instance, the made to measure shirtmaker, Charles Tyrwhitt has an online shop that can apply a buyer's previously entered measurements and preferences as it mails each order from the Jermyn Street shop. Every customer is thus treated as an individual, but there is capacity to cater for a mass market.

The fundamental prerequisite for presenting products and services online in the e- Business world is the catalogue. These are central, and are the electronic equivalent of a shop's shelves, goods, special offers and departments. The catalogue is the onlinerepresentation of what is "for sale" (or more correctly, what is available for trading).

It is important to appreciate that there are different scales of catalogue. They range from a set of web pages and a simple script that allows orders to be taken through mid range catalogue products that arecharacterised by a pre-defined structure of product categories and sub categories, up to large scale corporate catalogues that are customisable. In this last case, there is usually back end integration with inventory, stock control and ordering systems.

Another important point about catalogues is that they are different for buyers and for sellers. The former is a virtual directory that allows the buyer to look at and judge a range of competing products from a number of different suppliers. The latter is a structured set of information that represents what a particular supplier has to sell. The technology used to represent these different types of catalogue has to match, that is, it either has to beoptimised for one seller and multiple buyers, or vice versa. More on this later.

One further differentiation in catalogues that should be made is that of business to business as opposed to business to consumer. The consumer oriented catalogues tend to be stronger on presentation, as they usually have to sell on the basis of eye appeal. The business catalogues are more focused on quick access to another business' needs, and these tend to be high volume and fairly routine. For instance, many supermarkets issue stock replenishment orders from their automated stock control systems they buya lot of carrots on a regular basis!

In short, the distinction between consumer and business oriented catalogues is akin to food mart against delicatessen.

Payment

So to the core of any business (and e-Business is no exception )—profit. Trade, commerce and business only exist to satisfy the needs and desires of the participants. This means one party getting something they want in exchange for something the other party wants; and usually it is money that fuels the desire to trade.

By its very nature, e-Business needs to emulate in some way the customary direct exchange of cash for goods. Attitudes to the use of different payment mechanisms are changing and vary when considering Europe, the US, Asia Pacific or the whole world. A priority in establishing an e-Business is to put in place an acceptable mechanism for payment. There are many technical options, and to choose appropriately, factors such as scale and acceptability all need to be carefully examined.

By way of illustration, there are various scales of payment to be considered: items such as books are regularly purchased electronically, and it is common for a single customer to buy a single book and pay with a single credit card transaction (probably in the ＄10 range). However, the cost of processing credit card transactions is quite high, and may not be economical for the purchase of small value items such as consumer reports or individual music tracks, which would typically be in the ＄110 range. Technologies exist for handling these small value payments (known as "micropayments"), and lumping them together into single credit card transactions. The range below ＄1 is often referred to as the area of "nanopayments". Such payments may represent, for example, the price of viewing an individual Internet page of information.

Not only are different technologies required to aggregate these various categories of small scale payments, but also the e-Business will need to put in place different strategies for such things as handling account queries and dealing with bad debts. For instance, a sensible way of dealing with lost nanopayments would be to write off the debts and blacklist the offenders—the cost of recovering the debt would be too high.

Settlement

It is all very well taking: a "virtual" payment for goods or services offered over the Internet but, at some point, this must be converted into dollar bills, Euros, or some other tangible form of money. Hence, we need a gateway between the virtual world and the real world—a payments gateway. This can be effected with automated connection to Merchant acquirers^[5], direct debits, or other systems.

Of course, traditional settlements are not mandatory. In the past, people have used all kinds of different objects to represent money: leaves, sticks, beads and even bits of metal or pieces of printed paper! In the electronic world there are additional possibilities, such as token based systems, where you first buy a number of tokens, in your chosen currency, and are then free to spend them on goods which are priced in tokens. An example of this is web "beanz" which are rather like on line loyalty card points. Electronic wallets and smart cards provide another alternative. Some of these types of electronic cash are fully portable, whereas others retain your wallet on your PC or on a server.

Presentation

As with catalogues, the way in which online products and services are presented depends upon the market. For the electronic shop, the art of window dressing is not really one that has transferred online as yet. Already the ease of use of online systems is coming under the scrutiny of consumer watchdogs such as Which？ Magazine, who report a significant impact of true presentation quality.

When there are many suppliers, the look and feel of the shop will make a big difference, as will the ease of use. In much the same vein, business to business transactions will need to be reliable and easy to use, in their own way.

The design of online information is very much in its infancy, but there are some basic guidelines for getting the right presence and operation for the job in hand. Navigational dead ends, inconsistent and out of date information, lack of an overall information map, frustrating and non intuitive structures and poor search/browse capabilities all put customers off. The electronic window dresser is one of a number of new skills being driven by e-Business.

One of the interesting twists to presenting what you have to offer online is that it is possible to find out exactly what each customer has looked at, what they purchased and when. This would consume a huge amount of time and video to do in a conventionalshop, but consists of little more than analysing system logs for an e-Business. Information about individual customers, their browsing and buying patterns, is an important piece of feedback on how to go about presenting your goods.

Security

In the "real" world you go into a shop to make somejudgement from its location, size, type of premises, how long it has been there, and so on, and you hand over cash in return for goods which you carry away. The risks are very small, and even if things do go wrong, you can usually exchange the faulty goods. You know where to go back to and who to talk to. If you don't get satisfaction you can even, as a last resort, make a scene, standing in the middle of a busy store, telling an assistant, as loudly as you are able, how badly you have been treated, can elicit rapid solutions to your problems.

When trading over the Internet, things are not so simple, the dream of the virtual trader can suddenly become a nightmare. For example, how do consumers know that the company they are dealing with is reputable, and is what it purports to be？ Conversely, how does the trader know that the consumer is not using stolen credit card details？

Furthermore, how do both parties ensure that their transaction takes place privately without someone else snooping on it or, even worse, tinkering with the transaction details while they are in transit across the network？ And when things go wrong as they inevitably do, what sorts of mechanism are there to ensure that both parties fulfill their obligations？

Secret codes have long been used to ensure the privacy of, information that must be sent byuntrusted carriers or public networks, in 1660, it was said that such codes were certainly for use by English aristocrats communicating with the exiled King Charles. In e- Business, the principle is the same, although the codes need to be a lot stronger because the potential eavesdroppers are sophisticated, and are assumed to have access to powerful computers and software.

There are many ways of establishing a secure communications link. Basically, for two people to be able to communicate using a code, they must "share a secret", and this secret must be denied to everyone else. The problem is how a trader and a consumer whowill probably never meet agree on a secret code that cannot be guessed by anyone else. The answer is to use a type of coding which employs a so called "asymmetric code". This is one in which the message is encoded using one key and decoded using a different key. In this instance, getting a copy of the encoding key, the so called "public" key, does not allow you to decode the message for that you need the other, "private", key.

Even if a link is secure, you need to know that it is the one you wanted. So, when you access an Internet site that calls itself First National Bank, you want to be sure that it is truly what it purports to be before you engage in a financial transaction with it. The way this is done is to have the site certified by a "trusted third party", who checks the authenticity of the site and provides certified copies of that site's "public key" for communicating securely. There are a number of types of certificates that are issued by such trusted third parties, each with its own level of trustworthiness and area of application.

Finally, what happens if something goes wrong？ There has to be some means of checking who promised what to whom, and when. The concept of non repudiation proving that a deal was struck is one that needs to be transferred into the world of e-Business. Thisis where verifiable records, and digital signatures fit.

A successful e-Business should consider and have viable policies, approaches and, solutions to all of the above issues. In addition, there is the small but important practicality that a certain amount of infrastructure has to be established before you can actually begin to trade online. The established mechanism for inter company transactions is known as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI^[6]). There are established standards, and an established body of know how in how to link to the fulfillment, inventory and other back end systems that make it possible to automate the end to end e-Business process, from ordering through to delivery. The "behind the scenes^[7]" aspects are an important part of the overall picture, and will be explained fully as we unfold our story.

Notes

[1] daisy chain: 串级链。

[2] Given this, it should come as no surprise: 假如情况是这样，…也不会令人吃惊。

[3] W. H. Smith, who have bookshops in most large towns in the UK, or Blackwells, who position themselves as global suppliers of academic books. W. H. Smith是英国的书店名。Blackwells是全球最大的学术书供应商。

[4] look and feel: 品质，观感。

[5] Merchant acquirers: (在线)收单会员，验证机构。

[6] Electronic Data Interchange(EDI): 电子数据交换(机)。

[7] behind the scenes: 在后台，在幕后。

Choose the best answer for each of the following: