Ecommerce Trends
Content
E-Commerce Project Report On
“Trends of Electronic-Commerce”
Under the supervision of: Dr. Saboohi Nasim
Submitted by: TABASSUM KHALID 11 MBA (IB) 10 Faculty of Management Studies & Research Aligarh Muslim University 2011-12
ELECTRONIC COMMERCE (E- Commerce) Information technology has become an inseparable element of today‟s society. It has interwoven itself into our socio-economic fabric in such a manner that it is often said that we live in an information age. Different organizations, industries, and regions of the world are adopting IT in various ways, it is increasingly penetrating the heart of organizations and will continue to do so in future. Technological revolutions have always had different effects on different segments of the economy. With the emergence of electronic commerce and wireless networks, trading activities have become much easier. Traditionally, commerce is seen as the exchange or buying and selling of goods and services, which involves exchange of money and sometimes transportation of goods from one place to another. With the passage of time and advancement of technology, commerce has added a new dimension in the form of electronic trade, a more effective and convenient manner than the traditional commerce which is revolutionizing the way business activities are carried out across the world. In today‟s business world, where time and money is considered as the most important factor for success, E- commerce plays an important role in bridging the gap between buyers and sellers. Most people think electronic commerce as buying and selling of products and services on the Internet. However, in reality, it is more than just selling and purchasing goods online. E-commerce is referred as a way of carrying business communication and transaction using computers over Internet, or any other form of network. Here, transaction is referred to as exchanges taking place between two entities where one sells products or services to the other. Processes in E-commerce: All information in e-commerce is expressed in the form of binary values (bits), which makes the product more versatile. For example, a tourism catalogue data stored in a web server database can be presented electronically using the web, printed in a customized catalogue at specific market, or might be included in CD-ROM in multimedia presentation. If any information is required to be published on the Interent, following hardware and software component required are web server, database, and multimedia authoring tools. Generally, there exist five important processes in an e-commerce lifecycle: Information sharing, ordering, payment, fulfillment, and support& services. Information sharing: sharing of information on the Internet is the foremost process in ecommerce activities. It makes the customer aware of all the product and services offered by the online vendor. This particular activity is carried out by means of advertising, marketing on the Internet and through customer information gathering process. Apart from this, there are various networked communities (chat room, multiparty conference, and newsgroup). Available on the internet for the distribution of information. World wide web provides one of the effective mediums for communication with the customers. Web sites are designed to include product catalogues. One can obtain the data for products that are requested. At the same time, it also allows web visitors to provide information about them. Apart from this, timely notification, product upgradation, and new features are sent through e-mail. Ordering: This process involves customers to electronically place order for the company‟s goods and services. Placing of order requires use of client/server application where order of goods or services is placed on the electronic form placed on the company‟s web site.
Online Payment: online payment is a crucial process in e-commerce. The payment activity requires use of high security to protect online money transactions from any unauthorized use on the Internet. In most cases, data is transferred in encrypted form on a secured medium. Different mechanisms for payment are available on the Internet and different customers have access to use any of them. Generally, there exist three main source of payment mode: e-cash, e-cheque, and credit card. Fulfillment: Modern businesses are highly dependent on the massive amount of information and precious data, which is continuously being transferred over the computer network across the world. Many online trading companies make use of Internet for transferring funds, generating money, and providing information product (newsletter, articles, stock prices, reports). However, when product takes the shape of physical entity, support of EDI is required to clear the sale of product to the buyer with up-to-date-delivery notification issued to the buyers e-mail. Service and Support: support and services are regarded as one of the most important processes in e-commerce activity. The continuing relationship of an organization with the customer depends on the kind of support and services provided to the customers. Relationship of an organization with the customer starts with the sale of the product. It might happen that customer will require assistance with product and services in future. Therefore, items such as technical notes, FAQs, and support documentation should be available on the company‟s web site.
MAJOR TRENDS IN E-COMMERCE The first wave of e-commerce transformed the business world of books, music, brokerage, and air travel. Today industries facing a similar transformation include marketing/advertising, telecommunications, entertainment, print media, real estate, hotels, bill payments, and software. The breath of E-commerce offerings grows, especially in travel entertainment, retail apparel, appliances, and home furnishings. Small businesses and entrepreneurs continue to flood into the e-commerce marketplace, often riding on the infrastructures created by industry giants such as Amazon, eBay, and Google. Brand extension through the Internet grows as large firms such as sears, JCPenney, L.L Bean, and Wal-Mart pursue integrated, multi-channel bricks and clicks strategies. B2B supply chain transactions and collaborative commerce continue to strenghthen and grow beyond the $3.6 trillion mark.
Society: Consumer and user generated content, and syndication in the form of blogs, works, virtual lives, and social networks, grow to form an entirely new self-publishing forum that engages millions of consumers. Virtual life sites such as second life emerge as a new form of Internet-based entertainment that causes millions to reduce television viewing. Traditional media such as newspapers, television broadcasters, and magazine publishers continue to lose subscribers, and adopt online, interactive models.
Conflicts over copyright management and control grow in significance. Over 105 million adults join a social network on the internet, with the majority over 35 years of age. Taxation of internet sales becomes more widespread and accepted by large online merchants. Controversy over content regulation and controls increases. Surveillance of Internet communications grows as a part of the “war on terror”. Internet Fraud, abuse and identity theft occurences increase. Spam grows despite new laws and promised technology fixes. Invasion of personal privacy on the Web expands as marketers expand their capabilities to track users.
Technology: Wireless Internet connections (Wi-Fi,WiMax, and 3G telephone) grow rapidly. New digital gadgets, such as the iPhone, that support Internet and telephone service along with digital music, video, and television appear. Podcasting takes off as a new media format for distribution of video, radio, and usergenerated content. iTunes becomes an operating system within windows for the play of music and video. The Internet broadband foundation becomes stronger in households and businesses. Bandwidth prices fall as telecommunications companies re-capatalize their debts. Computing and networking component prices continue to fall dramatically. New Internet-based models of computing such as NET and Web services expand B2B opportunities.
Recent trends happening in global e-commerce that seek to enhance the user experience: 1. Micro-payments – Among the most revolutionary changes in the coming months not years is the use of micro-payment systems from a variety of financial firms, e.g., Paypal, Visa, Western Union, among others, including banks. This trend is facilitated by the W3C working group that approved these protocols and technical standards for the interworking. These systems will change not only how we carry money but how we value money and think about purchases. (Consider how a purchase of $4.99 feels in a mobile app store vs. at Dunkin' Donuts.) Payment systems that make it easier to buy online, coupled with mobile technologies will accelerate the usage of global e-commerce applications.
Micropayments were initially devised as a way of allowing the sale of online content and were envisioned to involve small sums of only a few cents.These transactions would enable people to sell content on the Internet and would be an alternative to advertising revenue. During the late 1990s, there was a movement to create micro transaction standards, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) worked on incorporating micropayments into HTML even going as far as to suggest the embedding of payment-request information in HTTP error codes. The W3C has since stopped its efforts in this area,and micropayments have not become a widely used method of selling content over the internet. Early research and systems In the late 1990s, established companies like IBM and Compaq had microtransaction divisions, and research on micropayments and micropayment standards was performed at Carnegie Mellonand by the World Wide Web Consortium. IBM Micro Payments IBM's Micro Payments was established 1999, and were it to have become operational would have "allowed vendors and merchants to sell content, information, and services over the Internet for amounts as low as one cent". iPIN An early attempt at making micropayments work, iPIN was a 1998 venture capital funded startup that provided services which allowed purchasers to add incremental micropayment charges to their existing bill for Internet services. Debuting in 1999, its service was never widely adopted. Millicent Millicent, originally a project of Digital Equipment Corporation, was a micropayment system that was to support transactions from as small as 1/10 of a cent up to $5.00. It grew out of The Millicent Protocol for Inexpensive Electronic Commerce, which was presented at the 1995 World Wide Web Conference in Boston, but became associated with Compaq after that company purchased Digital Equipment Corporation. The payment system utilized symmetric cryptography. NetBill The NetBill electronic commerce project at Carnegie Mellon university researched distributed transaction processing systems and developed protocols and software to support payment for goods and services over the Internet. It featured pre-paid accounts from which micropayment charges could be drawn.Initiated in 1997, NetBill seems to have died completely sometime after 2005. 2. Mobile technologies – More people access the Internet on their mobile devices than on any other device. We are rapidly approaching the time (if we are not already there) where designs must be created for the mobile Web first, and for the desktop second. Mobile technologies facilitate comparison shopping; with the advent of barcode reader apps and price-comparison databases, a consumer could snap a bar code in Walmart and quickly reference product reviews and prices on walmart.com (or compare prices with Walmart competitors). Mobile technologies also facilitate impulse buys – especially with the
advent of micro-payments tied to the mobile device. Just recently, Starbucks customers can not only place an order with their Smartphone, but also make a purchase. Wireless technologies for mobile commerce can be roughly categorized into mobile client devices for interactivity (or m-commerce terminals) and communications infrastructure. Mobile Client Device Technologies and Issues: The interactivity devices or mobile client devices currently most important to wireless ecommerce are mobile telephones, handheld computers, laptop computers, and vehiclemounted interfaces. Hybrid devices are now appearing, such as the crosses between mobile phones and handheld devices (sometimes called smart phones), but the question remains as to what form the devices will ultimately take, which is an important issue for mobile system developers. Another important building block for this emerging infrastructure landscape may be the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which enables wireless devices such as mobile phones to access the Internet. Many WAP-enabled devices have already appeared, although there is doubt as to whether WAP will become a globally accepted standard, especially with the popularity of Japan‟s i-mode. Developers ultimately face the issue of deciding which set of protocols to accept, or risk the potential problems of working with multiple standards and/or choosing to ignore some. Communications Infrastructure Technologies and Issues The communications infrastructure necessary for the wireless Internet environment is quite complex. Wireless devices are likely to remain at a disadvantage over their wired counterparts in terms of bandwidth. Limited bandwidth is a significant problem that requires organizations to rethink how users interact through a wireless device with an information system. An important issue is how to create efficient applications that can realistically work with current technology.
3. Social media – Increasingly, the term "social business" is being used to try and suggest that engagement with social media is important to more than just marketing and PR departments, and should also affect those working in sales, human resource management and research and development.
There is also an increasing trend towards using social media monitoring tools that allow users to search, track and analyze conversation on the web about their brand or about topics of interest. This can be useful in PR management, campaign tracking, proving social media ROI. competitor-auditing and engagement. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools. The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks (identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships,
reputation, and groups). These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube‟s primary building blocks are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation. Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands. These are private communities that engage people around a more narrow theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, than social media containers such as Google+ or Facebook and also Twitter. As Facebook has become the most visited site on the Web, the role of social media, including Facebook and its local clones such as Twitter, is increasingly important. Social media sites increasingly act as points of entry to e-commerce sites, and vice versa, as ecommerce sites build rating, loyalty and referral systems tied to social media. Group buying (e.g., Groupon) is also gaining mainstream ground, with many "deal of the day" sites competing for an increasingly savvy consumer base, but improvements lie ahead as the social aspects and user experience are refined. 4. Fulfillment options – I believe that users will want to have multiple fulfillments and return options when interacting with a vendor: ship to address, courier, pick-up in store, return to store, etc. Having many fulfillment options is how customers view their overall customer experience. Some companies have made a business proposition online by being exceptional in service to the online channel (e.g., Zappos) 5. Global availability – Increasingly, consumers want the availability to buy products from foreign sites and have them delivered locally. Thus, currency and customs will be of growing concern to many online retailers. Along with this, there will be concerns with local privacy laws and restrictions on related data collection and storage. 6. Localization – While the trend is to globalize, what‟s often more important is to localize. User Centric‟s research clearly shows that sites that „feel‟ local – with proper imagery, language, time/date, weights/measures, currency, etc. – resonate far more than sites that seem culturally distant or sterile. 7. Customizability – Consumers want control, and want to be able to design the details of the items they purchase. 8. Time-based availability – Some of the hottest and most successful sites are those that have a time-critical response component. Sites like Groupon, Gilt and others capitalize on the perception of limited-time availability. Creating a sense of urgency drives traffic and purchase behavior. As companies race to add components to or modify existing Web pages to stay „on trend,‟ they must also continually evaluate how their end users will be affected and how a negative user experience will affect customer retention and, ultimately, the bottom line.
“Trends of Electronic-Commerce”
Under the supervision of: Dr. Saboohi Nasim
Submitted by: TABASSUM KHALID 11 MBA (IB) 10 Faculty of Management Studies & Research Aligarh Muslim University 2011-12
ELECTRONIC COMMERCE (E- Commerce) Information technology has become an inseparable element of today‟s society. It has interwoven itself into our socio-economic fabric in such a manner that it is often said that we live in an information age. Different organizations, industries, and regions of the world are adopting IT in various ways, it is increasingly penetrating the heart of organizations and will continue to do so in future. Technological revolutions have always had different effects on different segments of the economy. With the emergence of electronic commerce and wireless networks, trading activities have become much easier. Traditionally, commerce is seen as the exchange or buying and selling of goods and services, which involves exchange of money and sometimes transportation of goods from one place to another. With the passage of time and advancement of technology, commerce has added a new dimension in the form of electronic trade, a more effective and convenient manner than the traditional commerce which is revolutionizing the way business activities are carried out across the world. In today‟s business world, where time and money is considered as the most important factor for success, E- commerce plays an important role in bridging the gap between buyers and sellers. Most people think electronic commerce as buying and selling of products and services on the Internet. However, in reality, it is more than just selling and purchasing goods online. E-commerce is referred as a way of carrying business communication and transaction using computers over Internet, or any other form of network. Here, transaction is referred to as exchanges taking place between two entities where one sells products or services to the other. Processes in E-commerce: All information in e-commerce is expressed in the form of binary values (bits), which makes the product more versatile. For example, a tourism catalogue data stored in a web server database can be presented electronically using the web, printed in a customized catalogue at specific market, or might be included in CD-ROM in multimedia presentation. If any information is required to be published on the Interent, following hardware and software component required are web server, database, and multimedia authoring tools. Generally, there exist five important processes in an e-commerce lifecycle: Information sharing, ordering, payment, fulfillment, and support& services. Information sharing: sharing of information on the Internet is the foremost process in ecommerce activities. It makes the customer aware of all the product and services offered by the online vendor. This particular activity is carried out by means of advertising, marketing on the Internet and through customer information gathering process. Apart from this, there are various networked communities (chat room, multiparty conference, and newsgroup). Available on the internet for the distribution of information. World wide web provides one of the effective mediums for communication with the customers. Web sites are designed to include product catalogues. One can obtain the data for products that are requested. At the same time, it also allows web visitors to provide information about them. Apart from this, timely notification, product upgradation, and new features are sent through e-mail. Ordering: This process involves customers to electronically place order for the company‟s goods and services. Placing of order requires use of client/server application where order of goods or services is placed on the electronic form placed on the company‟s web site.
Online Payment: online payment is a crucial process in e-commerce. The payment activity requires use of high security to protect online money transactions from any unauthorized use on the Internet. In most cases, data is transferred in encrypted form on a secured medium. Different mechanisms for payment are available on the Internet and different customers have access to use any of them. Generally, there exist three main source of payment mode: e-cash, e-cheque, and credit card. Fulfillment: Modern businesses are highly dependent on the massive amount of information and precious data, which is continuously being transferred over the computer network across the world. Many online trading companies make use of Internet for transferring funds, generating money, and providing information product (newsletter, articles, stock prices, reports). However, when product takes the shape of physical entity, support of EDI is required to clear the sale of product to the buyer with up-to-date-delivery notification issued to the buyers e-mail. Service and Support: support and services are regarded as one of the most important processes in e-commerce activity. The continuing relationship of an organization with the customer depends on the kind of support and services provided to the customers. Relationship of an organization with the customer starts with the sale of the product. It might happen that customer will require assistance with product and services in future. Therefore, items such as technical notes, FAQs, and support documentation should be available on the company‟s web site.
MAJOR TRENDS IN E-COMMERCE The first wave of e-commerce transformed the business world of books, music, brokerage, and air travel. Today industries facing a similar transformation include marketing/advertising, telecommunications, entertainment, print media, real estate, hotels, bill payments, and software. The breath of E-commerce offerings grows, especially in travel entertainment, retail apparel, appliances, and home furnishings. Small businesses and entrepreneurs continue to flood into the e-commerce marketplace, often riding on the infrastructures created by industry giants such as Amazon, eBay, and Google. Brand extension through the Internet grows as large firms such as sears, JCPenney, L.L Bean, and Wal-Mart pursue integrated, multi-channel bricks and clicks strategies. B2B supply chain transactions and collaborative commerce continue to strenghthen and grow beyond the $3.6 trillion mark.
Society: Consumer and user generated content, and syndication in the form of blogs, works, virtual lives, and social networks, grow to form an entirely new self-publishing forum that engages millions of consumers. Virtual life sites such as second life emerge as a new form of Internet-based entertainment that causes millions to reduce television viewing. Traditional media such as newspapers, television broadcasters, and magazine publishers continue to lose subscribers, and adopt online, interactive models.
Conflicts over copyright management and control grow in significance. Over 105 million adults join a social network on the internet, with the majority over 35 years of age. Taxation of internet sales becomes more widespread and accepted by large online merchants. Controversy over content regulation and controls increases. Surveillance of Internet communications grows as a part of the “war on terror”. Internet Fraud, abuse and identity theft occurences increase. Spam grows despite new laws and promised technology fixes. Invasion of personal privacy on the Web expands as marketers expand their capabilities to track users.
Technology: Wireless Internet connections (Wi-Fi,WiMax, and 3G telephone) grow rapidly. New digital gadgets, such as the iPhone, that support Internet and telephone service along with digital music, video, and television appear. Podcasting takes off as a new media format for distribution of video, radio, and usergenerated content. iTunes becomes an operating system within windows for the play of music and video. The Internet broadband foundation becomes stronger in households and businesses. Bandwidth prices fall as telecommunications companies re-capatalize their debts. Computing and networking component prices continue to fall dramatically. New Internet-based models of computing such as NET and Web services expand B2B opportunities.
Recent trends happening in global e-commerce that seek to enhance the user experience: 1. Micro-payments – Among the most revolutionary changes in the coming months not years is the use of micro-payment systems from a variety of financial firms, e.g., Paypal, Visa, Western Union, among others, including banks. This trend is facilitated by the W3C working group that approved these protocols and technical standards for the interworking. These systems will change not only how we carry money but how we value money and think about purchases. (Consider how a purchase of $4.99 feels in a mobile app store vs. at Dunkin' Donuts.) Payment systems that make it easier to buy online, coupled with mobile technologies will accelerate the usage of global e-commerce applications.
Micropayments were initially devised as a way of allowing the sale of online content and were envisioned to involve small sums of only a few cents.These transactions would enable people to sell content on the Internet and would be an alternative to advertising revenue. During the late 1990s, there was a movement to create micro transaction standards, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) worked on incorporating micropayments into HTML even going as far as to suggest the embedding of payment-request information in HTTP error codes. The W3C has since stopped its efforts in this area,and micropayments have not become a widely used method of selling content over the internet. Early research and systems In the late 1990s, established companies like IBM and Compaq had microtransaction divisions, and research on micropayments and micropayment standards was performed at Carnegie Mellonand by the World Wide Web Consortium. IBM Micro Payments IBM's Micro Payments was established 1999, and were it to have become operational would have "allowed vendors and merchants to sell content, information, and services over the Internet for amounts as low as one cent". iPIN An early attempt at making micropayments work, iPIN was a 1998 venture capital funded startup that provided services which allowed purchasers to add incremental micropayment charges to their existing bill for Internet services. Debuting in 1999, its service was never widely adopted. Millicent Millicent, originally a project of Digital Equipment Corporation, was a micropayment system that was to support transactions from as small as 1/10 of a cent up to $5.00. It grew out of The Millicent Protocol for Inexpensive Electronic Commerce, which was presented at the 1995 World Wide Web Conference in Boston, but became associated with Compaq after that company purchased Digital Equipment Corporation. The payment system utilized symmetric cryptography. NetBill The NetBill electronic commerce project at Carnegie Mellon university researched distributed transaction processing systems and developed protocols and software to support payment for goods and services over the Internet. It featured pre-paid accounts from which micropayment charges could be drawn.Initiated in 1997, NetBill seems to have died completely sometime after 2005. 2. Mobile technologies – More people access the Internet on their mobile devices than on any other device. We are rapidly approaching the time (if we are not already there) where designs must be created for the mobile Web first, and for the desktop second. Mobile technologies facilitate comparison shopping; with the advent of barcode reader apps and price-comparison databases, a consumer could snap a bar code in Walmart and quickly reference product reviews and prices on walmart.com (or compare prices with Walmart competitors). Mobile technologies also facilitate impulse buys – especially with the
advent of micro-payments tied to the mobile device. Just recently, Starbucks customers can not only place an order with their Smartphone, but also make a purchase. Wireless technologies for mobile commerce can be roughly categorized into mobile client devices for interactivity (or m-commerce terminals) and communications infrastructure. Mobile Client Device Technologies and Issues: The interactivity devices or mobile client devices currently most important to wireless ecommerce are mobile telephones, handheld computers, laptop computers, and vehiclemounted interfaces. Hybrid devices are now appearing, such as the crosses between mobile phones and handheld devices (sometimes called smart phones), but the question remains as to what form the devices will ultimately take, which is an important issue for mobile system developers. Another important building block for this emerging infrastructure landscape may be the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which enables wireless devices such as mobile phones to access the Internet. Many WAP-enabled devices have already appeared, although there is doubt as to whether WAP will become a globally accepted standard, especially with the popularity of Japan‟s i-mode. Developers ultimately face the issue of deciding which set of protocols to accept, or risk the potential problems of working with multiple standards and/or choosing to ignore some. Communications Infrastructure Technologies and Issues The communications infrastructure necessary for the wireless Internet environment is quite complex. Wireless devices are likely to remain at a disadvantage over their wired counterparts in terms of bandwidth. Limited bandwidth is a significant problem that requires organizations to rethink how users interact through a wireless device with an information system. An important issue is how to create efficient applications that can realistically work with current technology.
3. Social media – Increasingly, the term "social business" is being used to try and suggest that engagement with social media is important to more than just marketing and PR departments, and should also affect those working in sales, human resource management and research and development.
There is also an increasing trend towards using social media monitoring tools that allow users to search, track and analyze conversation on the web about their brand or about topics of interest. This can be useful in PR management, campaign tracking, proving social media ROI. competitor-auditing and engagement. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools. The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks (identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships,
reputation, and groups). These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube‟s primary building blocks are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation. Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands. These are private communities that engage people around a more narrow theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, than social media containers such as Google+ or Facebook and also Twitter. As Facebook has become the most visited site on the Web, the role of social media, including Facebook and its local clones such as Twitter, is increasingly important. Social media sites increasingly act as points of entry to e-commerce sites, and vice versa, as ecommerce sites build rating, loyalty and referral systems tied to social media. Group buying (e.g., Groupon) is also gaining mainstream ground, with many "deal of the day" sites competing for an increasingly savvy consumer base, but improvements lie ahead as the social aspects and user experience are refined. 4. Fulfillment options – I believe that users will want to have multiple fulfillments and return options when interacting with a vendor: ship to address, courier, pick-up in store, return to store, etc. Having many fulfillment options is how customers view their overall customer experience. Some companies have made a business proposition online by being exceptional in service to the online channel (e.g., Zappos) 5. Global availability – Increasingly, consumers want the availability to buy products from foreign sites and have them delivered locally. Thus, currency and customs will be of growing concern to many online retailers. Along with this, there will be concerns with local privacy laws and restrictions on related data collection and storage. 6. Localization – While the trend is to globalize, what‟s often more important is to localize. User Centric‟s research clearly shows that sites that „feel‟ local – with proper imagery, language, time/date, weights/measures, currency, etc. – resonate far more than sites that seem culturally distant or sterile. 7. Customizability – Consumers want control, and want to be able to design the details of the items they purchase. 8. Time-based availability – Some of the hottest and most successful sites are those that have a time-critical response component. Sites like Groupon, Gilt and others capitalize on the perception of limited-time availability. Creating a sense of urgency drives traffic and purchase behavior. As companies race to add components to or modify existing Web pages to stay „on trend,‟ they must also continually evaluate how their end users will be affected and how a negative user experience will affect customer retention and, ultimately, the bottom line.
