1. Electronic Commerce Chapter 9 – Computers: Understanding Technology

2. Electronic Commerce Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, is the buying and selling of products and services electronically over the Internet Some businesses, such as Amazon.com, solely do business over the web whereas many traditional retailers (bricks-and- mortar companies) sell both at their physical locations and over the web

3. Types of Business to Consumer E- Commerce Online shopping Online services Peer-to-peer transactions

4. Advantages of Online Shopping No travel and can do at any time of the day or day of week More selection More product information available, either through the site or other sites Ease of comparison shopping

5. Shopping Agents/Bots At the web site of the shopping agent, you enter the name of the product and it returns the price charged by various online stores for that product, complete with links to the exact pages in online stores offering that product Popular ones are BizRate, DealCatcher, MySimon, and Froogle Such tools facilitate comparison shopping

6. Online services Online banking – electronic funds transfer reducing use of checks Online loans – consumer has access to a national market rather than a local one Investing – stock trades, research, portfolio analysis Online travel –travel agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz) which are solely online –most airlines now charge extra for paper ticket –Seat assignment and checkin via internet

7. Peer-to-Peer Online Transactions Online auctions – eBay market value is 43.6B (General Motors 20.5B) (6/25/07) –Peer-to-peer because eBay is neither buyer nor seller –Rating system to build trust in the seller –Payment systems that offered protection afforded to credit card purchases even though seller can’t process credit cards Person-to-Person payment systems – PayPal, Google Checkout – –PayPal/Checkout does the credit card processing for a transaction and thus the seller need not have this capability –The buyer’s financial information (bank account or credit card) is held by PayPal or Checkout and never transmitted to seller thus buyer is more comfortable dealing with unknown sellers than if this information were transmitted Digital music distribution – post-Napster