Chapter 9 Summary
After my reading of Chapter 9, I learned a lot of new things about e-commerce and how over the years being on the internet it has shaped the way we as consumers buy and sell things online. For th majority of my life the internet has been apart of it, whether it is watching YouTube videos, movies on Netflix, or playing video games, and in the last 10 years e-commerce! Having all of the different e-commerce sites available nowadays I never realized how many different types exist. The main ones include Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Consumer to Consumer (C2C), and oddly enough even Consumer to Business (C2B). This chapter also discussed the aspect of mobile commerce, which is just doing online shopping, but on a mobile device. When I use my phone, I totally blank out the idea that I am technically using mobile commerce daily whether I am ordering something on my phone or paying for something through a third party app.
Something in this chapter that really stuck out to me is the publishers of the e-commerce sites and how detailed the structure of one is. When looking for something specific, I usually just type something into the search, scroll until I find the filters to change price Low to High, and then I add whatever product I want to my cart. All of these features for ecommerce sites are broken down in the chapter. Each of these processes are carefully designed together to make purchasing something online way easier for the consumer. A process I always thought was just a straight forward idea is a structured system to increase sales of whatever product it is being sold.
Another idea that this chapter discussed was different revenue models and how these big companies are making A LOT of their money online. Some businesses are only dot coms, but some other companies have a e-commerce store AND a physical location, the main example that comes to my mind are shoe stores, and grocery stores. All of these places have a physical location but they also have websites that you are able to order pickup & delivery. Most companies rely on direct sales from their stores, but others (mainly the e-commerce stores) offer a monthly subscription to be able to access other content. I also pay for subscriptions like Netflix, Hulu, etc but these places have no physical locations, only subscriptions to see the content.
When paying for stuff, this chapter talked pretty big about digital wallets such as Paypal, Google Wallet and Apple Wallet. I quite literally use Apple Pay every single day, and was completely unaware how much data Apple collects about my spending habits. This chapter also talked about near field communication (NFC), which is the technology that allows your stored credit cards and ID’s to be transmitted wirelessly to payment terminals which is absolutely insane to me, the wrong person with the wrong technology could use this maliciously and steal your information in seconds. This ties directly into the security and privacy concerns that are rampant across the internet especially when coming across a website that a consumer may not know if it is legit or not making buying something dangerous.