Chapter 7, Ethical, Social, and Political Issues in E-commerce

I read an article that talked about the impact of NSA surveillance on the technology industry.

The issue lies with the U.S. NSA and their monitoring of communications worldwide and the negative effects it is having on the technology sector, jobs specifically, for Americans. With this surveillance in place, governments abroad are showing distrust of America, and vice a versa.

They even talked about France and Germany creating an EU-wide communication network so they could bypass having to go through the U.S. But everyone is concerned that the internet may just end up "breaking" because of the reactions to the NSA's activities.

Quote about the above: 'If the internet isn't somehow broken by reactive Balkanization and software/hardware firewalling in response to [the NSA's activities], then it's likely to simply become a swamp, void of any real meaning, through concerted efforts by Google and a zillion other online data-tracking, data correlating and data-selling commercial organizations focused on monetizing users' personal information for maximum possible gain," said Stealthbits CTO Kyle Kennedy.'

One possible solution some nations, such as Brazil are going for is called data localization. 'This in itself breaks the internet due to it creating a "border" of just how far the internet can go', according to Colin Stretch, general counsel at Facebook. He also warns this could make the data less secure and allow more access by the country in which data localization is being used for espionage since there are some that don't obey the rules.

Some smaller companies like Dropbox are concerned if this becomes a trend to localize data. During a discussion in Palo Alto, IBM announced plans to spend a whopping $1 billion on creating local data centers inside Europe. Dropbox on the other hand doesn't have a billion just doing nothing on hand. With more than 70% of Dropbox's customers being overseas, and "20 or so countries" proposing data localization, this could very well make it impossible for Dropbox to retain those customers.

Some feel that the tech industry could benefit from data localization, in particular Jim McGregor, an analyst at Tirias Research. He says they would create more servers and foreign countries would "invest more to build up their IT."

What do you think?

Chapter 6, E-commerce Marketing and Advertising Concepts

I found an article that talked about some of the key behaviors by consumers that are changing online marketing.

It discussed the old way in which consumers would buy products online, through comparison shopping sites. However in this day and age consumers are busier than ever and want all of the information they need in as little searches as possible.

Consumers rely on queries that bring them more specific information, such as the model number of a phone or computer they are interested in researching more about. They are also more responsive to imagery, instead of long amounts of data to go through. Pinterest/Instagram are good examples of the success that images have on consumers, they are simple and show you visually the thing you are interested in. The article even cites a source stating that images rank higher than product specific details, description, ratings or reviews as being the reason for making a purchase.

Consumers also rely on the opinions of others before making purchases, which is one reason that Amazon is such a successful marketplace, it fulfills this consumer desire. The article even states what HubSpot found to be 71% of people were more likely to make a purchase based on friends' social media suggestions, and 70% based on customer reviews (see Amazon). These two things of course tie back into trust, which makes a purchasing decision easier and more likely to happen.

Consumers also want facts, the details about the products they are looking for that are accurate, and not some clever marketing and advertising scheme. Even with all of these things working perfectly together, the consumer is also heavily affected by price, and if in the end the price isn't worth it in their eyes they won't buy the product.

Chapter 4, Building an E-commerce Presence: Web Sites, Mobile Sites, and Apps

In this chapter I chose to blog about mobile apps. Forbes.com listed an article titled "is 2014 finally the year of mobile?" The contributor from Forbes, Ms. Whitler seems to think so, she cites data from IBM's analytics benchmark as an indicator that mobile traffic has been steadily driving 25% of total online traffic to retail sites. Even more evident that this is the year for mobile is that 20% and higher of total online sales are from mobile.

The article talks about the importance of companies designing mobile apps from the ground up for their business, instead of trying to take an existing business website and fit it into the mobile format because of the issues that arise.

One thing in particular I thought was very interesting was the IBM "presence zones," which engage customers in store by using location-based sensors to send them promotions in real time based on their location in the store, and time spent in certain aisles.

Something in the article also reminded me of the article we read about "IT doesn't matter" by the Harvard Business Review. It was the last paragraph, Ms. Whitley quotes Henderson as saying that "I'd love to say all you need to do is buy some technology, but it isn't a one dimensional problem. You have to pick the right technology and invest in the right people and re-imagine your internal processes."