Internet Assignment 2

Internet Assignment 2 EC 400 Fundamentals of Electronic Commerce

City University of seattle

Internet Assignment 2

EC 400 Fundamentals of Electronic Commerce

Balam Enrique Ponce Tequida

1/3/2015

1. One of the most global companies is Amazon.com (www.amazon.com). Find stories about its global strategies and activities (try google.com and forbes.com). What are the most important lessons you learned?

As many of us already know Amazon is now a day one the e commerce sites with more sales in the market and this is not only in the United States but also in other countries around the globe like France, United Kingdom, and Germany and with its brand new site in China.

In a market where competence is getting bigger and bigger it is hard to compete if you do not have the enough tools to differentiate from other companies whether if you offer goods or services. Amazon as an e commerce web site does not specializes in only one branch of products as just selling clothes, or electronics for example. Their line of products sold goes from electronics, clothing, books, toys, jewelry and almost every product that you can imagine.

One of the greatest strategies that Amazons frequently uses to attract people to use their web site to buy whatever product that the need is to offer free shipping and one day shipping, this creates a great difference between their competence because as an online retailer it is very hard to eliminate the costs that shipping produces.

Other of the strategies that Amazon has worldwide is that they normally offer great discounts that are way too attractive for costumers because they sell products at price that are very low compared to their original prices.

Amazon has also made a big effort to gain costumers in the E book market being this one of their greatest area due to the earnings that it produces to the company. Because of this Amazon started to commercialize their own tablet, the Kindle, which at its low costs offer the possibility to run e books through their software that runs different Amazon services making them to gain more earning with this, an example of the importance of this is that in the UK, 90% of the e book market is under Amazons sales.

1. Visit http://www.vendio.com/ (formerly auctionwatch.com) and report on the various services provided. What is the sites revenue model?

Vendio offer several different services in order to make a great ecommerce site, it offers tools for hosting, software, management, marketing and promotion reporting and the chance to sell through other sites such as Amazon, EBay or even Facebook and just to mention some of their services.

I dare to say that from all the websites that I visited during previous assignments Vendio is the one that offers the best tools in the same place in order to begin a successful road in the ecommerce market and not only to star but also to develop and maintain a e business.

Vendio offers a very simple revenue model through different categories of monthly fees to access to their services, these fees go from $25 dollars being the starter pack to $250 dollars which is the premier managed pack, there is another option called enterprise which is custom priced it depends of the requirements of the client.

1. Research an EC topic of interest and provide a brief history and synopsis of what you learned (2 3 paragraphs).

Role and importance of trust on EC

Trust in the key to every successful relationship whether if its a personal, business or romantic one it does not matter. In the world of business trust is the main key to gain a client, sometimes it even does not depend on the greatness of the product offered but in the ability to attract the clients attention and gain their trust. Because nothing is more secure than going directly to a physical store and bought whatever we need without running the risk to be scammed or robbed.

Almost every online store requires the use of a credit card to buy from them, as a credit card holder I know the responsibility that it comes with having a credit card because the money that you are going to spend technically it is not yours and it need to be paid as soon as possible so we want to protect that card from being hacked and used for other things. The first thing that would make us feel trustful for a website is if their have secure browsing and if it has any security certificate that protects us as costumers from that site. Other thing that makes us doubt from a website is the uncertainty of knowing if our product is going to arrive to us and in what condition it may arrive. Websites need to offer certain warranties like return of money for the purchase if something happens with the shipment, by having this, costumers may feel more secure of knowing that I will get a refund if something goes wrong in the process.

The best way to gain trust in costumers is to advertise our goods and star to sell them in sites that are trustful in order to get the people to know and identity us. For example selling products in sites like Amazon or even in click n mortar stores like Walmart will make our products to be identified by customers and give certain position to our brand to gain some trust. Once a brand is identified by the possible costumers there will exist a certain level of trust to buy from you online, because trust is not given , is earned.

1. Visit the Woordrow calculator (or similar) site and conduct the following calculations: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/. Look under the What is a dollar worth? (right hand side of the website). Enter the criteria in each scenario below into the fields and select Calculate:

0. How much would a $50 pair of jeans bought in 1997 cost the year you were born? For this calculation I used the year of 1994, which was the year I was born.

0. How much would a $6 hour jobs in 1997 have earned in 1970?

0. How much would a $12,000 1997 car have cost the year you got your first driver's license? For this calculation is used the year of 2013, which was the year I got my first drivers license

0. What did you learn from this exercise? Include comments about using the Web.

In a previous course we learned about the future and present value of money, and it that course we discovered that money value changes from one period of time to another, due to some indexes such as the consumer price and the inflation rates that together make the value fluctuate, these rates are constantly changing in periods of months and year, making the value of your money different just from one year to the next one, obviously it does not varies that much from year to another, it could really change is there would exist a financial crisis at the moment but regularly the differences it not that great only in great periods of times like from ten or twenty years for example.

I remember that using different formulas to determine the value of money from one period to another it was difficult in some occasions but thanks to the website mentioned in the questions it is very easy now to calculate it, in fact this is a tool that it would be very handy to save for when I need it in the future.

1. Enter the home pages of Wal-Mart (www.wal-mart.com) and Amazon (www.amazon.com). Identify the acceptable payment methods in each site. What kinds of security measures has each site adopted?

Walmart accepts credit cards, Pay Pal, check cards, cash, and the own credit card from the store while Amazon accepts credit and debit cards, store points and checking accounts as payments methods.

Walmart does no mention which security measures offers to its clients besides offering tips to them to prevent frauds and scams that can be produced for buying in their website. In other hand Amazon does mention which are the security measures provided to their clients. Amazon offers on the most secure infrastructures of online security that exists, AWS cloud. This system offers many different built in security features like extensive network and security monitoring systems, also secure access is provided by allowing secure HTTP access to the site. Amazon uses encrypted data storage to maintain all the information not only from the site but also from the clients secure.

Sources:

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. (n.d.) Retrieved from: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/

James, A. (2008). Amazon talks strategy, international growth. Retrieved from: http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/2008/12/10/amazon-talks-strategy-international-growth/

Johnson, M. (2010). Amazons smart strategy. Retrieved from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2010/id20100412_520351.htm

Trefis Team. (2013). How Amazon Plans on Driving Future growth. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/05/15/how-amazon-plans-on-driving-future-growth/

Amazon. (n.d.) AWS Security Center. Retrieved from: http://aws.amazon.com/security/?nc1=f_ls

Walmart. (n.d.) Retrieved from: http://www.walmart.com/

Vendio. (n.d.) Pricing. Retrieved from: https://secure.vendio.com/ecommerce/pricing

Vendio. (n.d.) About. Retrieved from: http://www.vendio.com/ecommerce/corporate

(n.a.). (2007). The importance of trust in the eCommerce segment. Retrieved from: http://www.ecommercenews.org/e-commerce-news-010/0274-062907-ecommerce-news.html