Scott Walters Exploring Stuff

Amazon.com is one of the success stories of the first internet wave. Ignoring the whole disintermediation, predatory disintermediation issue that can be read about at Hal Berghler’s Predatory Disintermediation article (see http://berghel.net/col-edit/digital_village/may-00/dv_5-00.php ) lets look at the systems used by Amazon.

Now over the years I’ve bought a lot of stuff off Amazon, in the early years I’d do 4 major book orders a year for my dot com company, more recently I’ve adopted from the Philippines and Amazon has been a good source of books about a distant culture and adoption issues.

On accessing Amazon it remembered my previous purchases. I have several products that are actually in my current areas of interest being pushed to me and I must say these are actually things that interest me. Something I hadn’t noticed before is that the recommendation system now says why this book is being recommended to me which may just be that I added a book to my shopping cart but never purchased it. Thats a useful feature since I may have not actually liked the book that is causing the recommendation. Drilling into the recommendation engine reasons I can now uncheck items that I don’t want to be used to help make recommendations.

Clicking on a book title I can see all the extended purchasing information Amazon offers. No I can’t physically flick through the pages but I can “look inside” and see a few of the pages. I can also see all the other books that cite this book, other books that people who buy this book have bought, editorial review, customer review and ratings. There is a lot of information here to make a purchase decision and if I don’t think this is the right item there’s lots of information to move me to other perhaps more appealing items.

Taking one more step and going to the order process for a book reminds me of something on Amazon, this is something I’ve done before. I’m comfortable with this. I trust this organisation. Building of trust is one of the difficult things for a e-organisation and Amazon appear to have done a good job.

Refs:

Berghler, Hal.; 29/Feb/2000.; Predatory Disintermediation.; http://berghel.net/col-edit/digital_village/may-00/dv_5-00.php

Amazon Website.; http://www.amazon.com

AutoeBid UK – Reverse Auction

This is an interesting variation. The purchaser basically says what they are after and then the various vendors may bid for that business.

The reverse auction is very similar to the eprocurement business model whereby the business puts its requirements out to tender. The variation would be that the individual is doing the procuring.

Refs:

AutoeBid Website.; http://www.autoebid.com/

Bang & Olufsen Launch e-Commerce Solution

Bang & Olufsen, a premium consumer electronics company, has a new web site. Lots of pretty pictures and seems to work well but I’m not sure what they’re trying to get at with the article, maybe its something I cant see because I’m in Australia and not their target market (US).

Refs:

Bang & Olufsen America, Inc. Launches New e-Commerce Solution for All United States Residents; http://www.kensei-news.com/biz_news/publish/retailers/article_46943.shtml

Over the next few weeks I intend to research “E-commerce, distributed applications and the Internet“. This blog details my personal experience and understanding gained over the course of the research.

Starting with basics was a search for a definition of e-commerce. The definition that I think is most appropriate comes from the text where Ince defines e-commerce as “online retailing” while e-business is more general and concerns all business activities that use the Internet.

I have some experience in this area having run an internet company that grew to approximately 35 people between 1996 and 2002 when it all came crashing down in a less than tasteful mess. My company Nemas was squarely in the ebusiness arena although at the time we didn’t use that terminology, instead we were developers of web based applications that interacted with databases and legacy systems.

So, on with the research.

Refs:

Ince, Darrell (2004), Developing Distributed and E-Commerce Applications