E-Business Applications For Internet Things

Ease of Use of E-commerce Sites

Discuss about the E-Business Applications for Internet Things.

E-business mainly includes the operational activities and management issues using ‘internet things’ and follows ‘big data management’; which in simpler words is referred to as performing business through the web (Curty and Zhang, 2013, pp.260). The business procedure mainly includes the buying and selling of products and managing the informational flow through internet tools. This archetype includes data management, information practices, storage of data, secure shell environment, and encryption of information in safe context according to legislative context framed by government agencies. Other business requirement includes provision of providing customer service, partnership with business collaborators, transaction of payments, and recruitment of vendors or suppliers, via the same provision and that the data management will incur above described operational tools (Bertarelli, 2015, pp. 75). One of the examples of such e-business is e-bay Australia, which is an international market over internet.  According to a current survey, it has been estimated that there are around 95 million regular users of e-bay Australia. It is worth mentioning that approximately 2500 sellers in Australia earn their primary source of income through e-bay.

The scope of the present report is further based on the description of e-business, thereby focusing on elements like (i) application of e-commerce mechanism; (ii) marketing strategies; (iii) supply chain management strategies; and (iv) related architecture that supports these operational management issues. The discussion scope is being elaborated taking the example of e-bay, Australia, as an example and underpinning the e-business strategies employed herewith. Finally, based on the understanding and discussion context, a section comprising of recommendation for a set of actions and activities that can make the e-business activity more efficient is also discussed. 

The e-bay Australia sites are much easier to use and that it provides an opportunity to be operated by any new user. They are so designed and programmed that the targeted customers can easily search and buy their desired products quickly. The customers are able to view the product categories and subcategories at the home page of the site and with simple navigation it gives the detailed information (Le-Nguyen and Guo, 2016, pp.1). This is reflective of architecture making use of cloud computing in which large data flow can be managed in a small internet traffic approach. It also provides an option for view the history of the recently viewed products, which prevent customers from navigating back as well as collect further information for customer’ choice and option which can be later used for market research. Notably, the search data of any customer remains secure and private to that customer itself. The products sold on this site are authenticated and have a comprehensive warranty as per the collaborative informational sharing with vendors (Bertarelli, 2015, pp. 75). Additionally, provides an option for the users to use ‘Photobucket,’ which allows uploading and downloading images of products on the e-bay site that helps in attracting customers and providing them a precise set of information (Bones and Hammersley, 2015).

Applications of E-commerce

One of the critical application is e-bay merchandising API, which is being used by E-bay developers to highlight the products and items which are popular among customers (Curty and Zhang, 2013, pp.260). It helps to recover significant data of goods or items present in E-bay such that the users can merchandise more sellers to the buyers.

Further applications of e-commerce is nowadays used in most of the business includes (Gallo, Randazzo and Gallo, 2016):

• Retail or wholesale through online retailing of products to consumers through e-stores
• Availability of all products is available in one single place through the internet.
• Using e-commerce application in the finance department to manage a secure shell for the transaction.
• Customer service management
• A collection of information and making it useful for market research purpose.

The marketing strategy of e-bay Australia is highly advanced and based on social media like virtual tools. It uses the mobile optimize technology as its market strategy which reports around 53% of the total mobile traffic in Australia. It generally focuses on customization and sells the product according to the interest of customers (Malik and Prasad 2014, pp.165). It is worth mentioning that E-bay presents great stories for advertising as well as for offering discount schemes to their products that tend to attract customers. Communication with the social media and bloggers to know and share people’s stories and their products is also included in the above-mentioned marketing strategy. For example, the current and latest social media agency employed for marketing at E-bay is ‘We are Social,’ which ensure a safe and friendlier paradigm for the customer segment (Bones and Hammersley, 2015). This is reflective of the fact that the prior and solitary objective of this social media is to share and advocate the products and stories. 

In the today’s modern world, the supply chain management handles and operate via the traditional brick and mortar retailers. The platform of e-bay Australia provides a broad range of opportunities to support all types of retailers (Hughes and Beukes, 2012, pp.921). It coordinates between the retail associates and customers with the help of the internet, mobile service, and other services. When a customer visits this online store and places an order for any product, then it contacts its retailers for availability of the product. The product is collected from the inventory of the retailer to E-bay, where again it is delivered to the particular customer through another private agency (outsourcing) or through fixed logistic supply organization (Pranata, Skinner and Athauda, 2013, pp.455). Therefore to manage synchronization in such a comprehensive process, the retailers have to manage real-time access and inventory movement. E-bay has to take requisite care of any misplacement of orders, having multiple numbers of retailers, warehouses and sales channels. This strategy of supply chain at E-bay is managed with ICT (Information and Communication Technology), explained in preceding section. In this process, the customers are also given the freedom to track their product before delivery that gains their confidence and trust on the e-commerce strategy. 

E-Commerce Marketing Strategies

According to Ha and McGregor (2013) the customers often feel insecure and risky to buy from vendors through online shopping. Due to this insecurity, there are chances of the negative impact of customer’s engagement with e-commerce strategy. The safety aspect of E-bay Australia provides ‘buyer protection’ for the Australian as well as abroad customers through security policy which is also available on their homepage. In order to protect their official site from any type of malware attack, several security programs are installed to mitigate the effect of malware. The administrator of E-bay Australia can only perform the administrative task, which is denied for any outsiders to access and accession to customer-prioritized information; which also aids to the security measures (Ha and McGregor, 2013, pp.1).  

The IT architecture of E-bay Australia is well-versed and making it secure and simpler for the users. It is designed in such a way that it supports faster-loading pages and reduced traffic load during the peak hours or weekends. Software like ICT (information communication technology) has been installed on their website, which helps the customers for tracking and performing transaction matter (Tatnall, 2014, pp.549). The cloud services, which can be operated in Windows, Linux, and devices like iPhone, tab, and smartphone in few minutes. Internal to the organization, the system also enables communication with the vendor, bidding and order collection, logistic feedback, and customer opinion. Additionally, E-bay Australia provides online payment gateway generally through PayPal, MasterCard and also provides the option for cash on delivery (Tatnall, 2014, pp.549).

Though e-bay Australia is technically well-versed and customer’s prior choice but still it requires certain improvements and advancements.

• Most of the customers, especially young customers are impulsive and have no patience to view the inside of the website. There is a chance of skipping the site if the homepage does not attract the customers. Thus, E-bay should focus on the improving the detailing and security of the website, so that the clients can quickly browse and view their desired product (Wang and Zhang, 2013, pp.303).
• Applications such ASP.NET should be installed to increase functionality, simplicity, and safety (Li, Wu and Lai, 2013, pp.740).
• It should provide multiple carts for shopping for the convenience of the customers. The cart should design should be such that it should be a user-friendly application, which provides the features to view, delete, or add products to the cart (Xiao and Benbasat, 2014, pp.403).

Conclusion

In summary, it can be concluded that e-commerce business like E-bay Australia has become the ultimate shopping destination for the present people. It not only helps the customer to buy variety products at one click but also provides a huge platform for the vendors to sell their products at their suitable price. It not only supplements customer’s requirements but also understands their needs and demands and work accordingly. They also prefer to take customer’s feedback and views for further improvement. Overall, the report illustrated the e-commerce strategies for managing business environment thereby integrating modules like communication, information management, logistic supply, and feedback collection with ‘internet things.’

References:

Bertarelli, S., 2015. On the efficacy of imperfect public-monitoring of seller reputation in e-commerce. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 14(2), pp.75-80.

Bones, C. and Hammersley, J., 2015. Leading Digital Strategy: Driving Business Growth Through Effective E-commerce. Kogan Page Publishers.

Curty, R.G. and Zhang, P., 2013. Website features that gave rise to social commerce: a historical analysis. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 12(4), pp.260-279.

Ha, H. and McGregor, S.L., 2013. Role of Consumer Associations in the Governance of E-commerce Consumer Protection. Journal of Internet Commerce, 12(1), pp.1-25.

Hughes, S. and Beukes, C., 2012. Growth and implications of social e-commerce and group buying daily deal sites: The case of Groupon and LivingSocial. The International Business & Economics Research Journal (Online), 11(8), p.921.

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Malik, M.R. and Prasad, R., 2014. Use of e-Commerce in Carpet Industry. Knowledge Horizons. Economics, 6(3), p.165.

Pranata, I., Skinner, G. and Athauda, R., 2013, June. A survey on the usability and effectiveness of web-based trust rating systems. In Computer and Information Science (ICIS), 2013 IEEE/ACIS 12th International Conference on (pp. 455-460). IEEE.

Tatnall, A., 2014. ICT, education and older people in Australia: A socio-technical analysis. Education and Information Technologies, 19(3), pp.549-564.

Wang, J. and Zhang, Y., 2013. Opportunity model for e-commerce recommendation: right product; right time. In Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 303-312). ACM.

Xiao, B. and Benbasat, I., 2014. Research on the use, characteristics, and impact of e-commerce product recommendation agents: A review and update for 2007–2012. In Handbook of Strategic e-Business Management (pp. 403-431). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.