Research Issues in E-commerce (lecture 11)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

December 12, 2004 [13189 views]

This lecture is the last in the series for the undergraduate course in e-commerce and attempts to widen some of the issues that we have discussed so far by looking at some research questions. It will also encourage students to think beyond the limitations of the current sites they are looking at.

Research into electronic commerce is being conducted in Business Schools, Design Colleges, Psychology, Law and Computing Departments across the world as well as in major companies and government organisations. This research may be looking at trends in the underlying technologies (payment, security, comparison engines, search, personalisation, marketplace tools) or in the marketing, design and management of stores and businesses (customer behaviour, pricing strategies, usability, promotional tactics and links with offline business).

Some of the interesting questions (a personal perspective)

What factors or combinations of factors within the site design encourage people to buy?
Virgin Credit Card is a case study for exploring what makes customers convert

What decision support systems can we create to help customers evaluate the products and services that offered by a store?
Dealing with Learning in eCommerce Product Navigation and Decision Support

How can we plan e-commerce projects better by measuring the complexity of the project before we start?
A B2C approach to e-commerce costings

What are the impacts of web services (partnerships, outsourcing and aggregation) on electronic commerce?
IBM Research into Web Services

How can recommendation systems be constructed to match products to customers based on previous purchases by other shoppers?
An introduction to collaborative filtering
Research article on linking CRM and e-commerce

Site components that might affect conversion rate

• Branding components (sales messages, logo)
• Trust components (security, guarantees)
• Customer visibility (other people have ordered, testimonials)
• Price and discount visibility
• Competitor comparison
• Customer service facilities (telephone numbers)
• Product alternatives (you might like this instead)
• Product information

Designing an environment for testing the impact of site components

• Component functionality modularised
• Alternative versions of modules created
• Alternatives offered randomly to customers
• Customer identified (by persistent cookie) and served same version in future
• Conversion rates recorded for each alternative

Measuring project complexity

1. Product modelling
2. Integration - Availability
3. Fulfilment - Return handling, Split ordering
4. Marketing and search engine optimisation - Measure of competition in the same marketplace
5. Decision support tools

Selected sources of research information

E-commerce papers achive from MIT
eLab from Vanderbilt University
E-commerce research room (commercial)
E-business Research Centre (from www.cio.com)
Journal of E-commerce Research
Electronic Markets
International Journal of E-commerce Research
Penn State eBusiness Research Centre
JPB (commercial)

Non-obvious things that you can do for a customer

1. Show information and news from the industry
2. Allow customers to talk to staff or each other
3. Allow customers to negotiate price
4. Help customers buy from competitors (where goods are unavailable)
5. Allow customers to sell on your site
6. Help online customers make use of retail locations
7. Put ingredients, manuals, circuit diagrams, plans etc online
8. Allow customers to contact your suppliers directly
9. Sell for a higher price online than in the stores
10. Collaborate with other businesses on delivery

Questions to think about

1. How much of business will be done online in ten years time?
2. How will new businesses get themselves noticed?
3. Some types of goods will never be suitable for selling online?
4. Prices will generally fall as e-commerce becomes more widespread (think music)?
5. How can customers become more powerful in their relationships with business using online?

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