Unique Features of E- Commerce SIR SHAMSUL BAHARIN BIN SAIHANI SAIFUL IZZUDIN AHMAD FARAHI

Unique Features of E- Commerce  The eight unique features of e- commerce technology  Ubiquity  Global reach  Universal standards  Richness  Interactivity  Information density  Personalization / customization  Social Technology

Ubiquity  Commerce is available just about everywhere, at all times  It liberates the market from being restricted to a physical space (e.g. m-commerce)  Marketspace (instead of marketplace)  Reduces limitations of temporal (time) and geographical locations (place)  Reduces transaction costs  Examples of transaction costs are telephone calls, filling up forms, filing, searching for information, recording relevant information of transactions  Reduces cognitive energy (mental effort) to transact because it’s common for human to want immediate results with the least amount of effort.

Global reach  Permits commercial transactions to cross cultural and national boundaries far more convenient and cost effectively than in the past  Increases the potential market size  Reach  A measure of the number of users or potential customers an e-business can obtain  Television and newspapers can reach  a specific region, and at best one whole country

Universal standards  Strength of e-commerce technologies is that it employ universal standards  Easily and readily adopted by most countries in the world  Not true with telephones, radio and television  Television signals e.g. VHF, for example, are different between some countries

Richness  Richness refers to the complexity and content of a message  Traditional markets  Provide personal, face-to-face services using aural and visual cues  Challenge of e-commerce is to find ways to overcome lack of richness when communicating with customers  The Web, multimedia technology and interactive nature of web sites have improved the richness of communication in business transactions  What it lacks in richness is compensated with reach

Interactivity  Technology allows for two-way communication between seller and consumer  Television, radio and newspaper do not offer interactivity like the Web

Information density  Reduce cost of  Information collection, storage, processing and communications  Increases the currency, accuracy and timeliness of information  Prices and costs become more transparent  Price transparency refers to the ability of customers to find out the variety of prices in the market  The more sellers know about customers, the better able for them to implement price discrimination  Price discrimination takes place when a seller sells products or services at different prices to different buyers (depending on the buyers’ willingness to pay)  Cost transparency refers to the ability of customers to find out the cost sellers pay for products

Personalization  Target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person’s name, interests, and past purchases e.g. myyahoo.com

Customization  Design and produce the delivered products or services based on the buyer’s preferences or prior behaviour e.g. Dell

Social Technology  User content generation and social networking e.g. facebook, myspace, youtube, etc. Sites allow user to create and share content in the form of text, videos, photos, musics, etc.