E-Commerce - eBay - Free Essay Example

  E-COMMERCE Assignment set 1 1 a. eBay is the Worldà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s Online Marketplace  ®, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. Mention and explain the various opportunities offered by ecommerce for businesses. b. What are the advantages and disadvantages of eCommerce? Ans: (a) opportunities offered by ecommerce for businesses 1. Tourism and Travel Sector: This sector has updated its system with e- commerce services. Consumers can make online reservations of hotels, motels, air tickets, railway tickets, etc. 2. Banking Sector: Most banks have changed their working style by making their services available online through their respective websites. 3. Health Care Sector: This sector is large and uses a major part of government expenses. So, most health care companies communicate or exchange their services with each other. 4. Stock Sector: In the stock exchange sector, e-commerce services provide demit account facilities for customers who can do an overall analysis of the status of the stock areas and do their respective transactions. 5. Financial Sector: In India, the financial sector has ad opted e-commerce services and the users make maximum use of the same. Advantages of eCommerce: Customers can use the marketplace at all times with the use of e-commerce services. Customers are fully satisfied and receive better service. No mediators: Customers can directly contact the suppliers and remove all mediators. Using the e-commerce services, one can understand consumer behavior, for example, websites, products, schemes and modes of payment which are preferred by the customer. Can save time because they can purchase anything through the merchant websites. Disadvantages of eCommerce: 1.People who have no knowledge about electronic communication like the Internet, and computers find it difficult to transact electronically. 2. Small businessmen do not want to take any extra burden because they have no knowledge ofe-commercefunctions. 3. Some types of businesses are not fit fore-commerceservices. 4. Before implementinge-commerceservices in the business, it is necessary to complete certain legal formalities like authorization and authentication. 5. High risk for Internet startup organization. 6. Security problems 7. Customer relation problems 8. Data integrity problems 9. Customer satisfaction problems Q: 2 The TCP/IP reference model is the network model used in the current Internet architecture. This model is derived from the OSI model and they are relatively same in nature. Explain the different characteristics of Gateways in the TCP/IP reference model with a neat diagram b. Write short note on Hyper Te xt Markup Language (HTML) with example Ands: (a) Characteristics of Gateways Gateways provide full protocol conversion from one proprietary LAN technology to another, i.e. Ethernet to token ring or FDDI or any other standard or protocol rather than encapsulation It uses higher layers of the OSI model, perhaps through layer 7, the application layer. IBM SNA, DEC net, Internet TCP/IP and other protocols can be converted from network-to-network Unlike bridges and routers, gateways operate slowly because of protocol conversion. Consequently, they may create bottlenecks of congestion during periods of peak usage. Default Gateway Default gateway consists of manually registering router IP addresses in the host. This method is simple; and is the most frequently used. Note however, that if two or more routers are connected to the same subnet, the network administrator must determine which of these routers the message should be sent to. To solve this problem, a message calle d ICMP redirect is available. Default gateway checks the destination host address in the received message. If it determines that the message should be sent via other router, it will send back a redirect message that includes the IP address of the selected router, to the source host. When the source host receives this message, it stores the destination host address as well as the second router address so that it can send messages addressed to this host via the second router. (b) Hypertext Markup Language. Hypertextis the method by which you move around on the web à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬  by clicking on special text calledhyperlinkswhich bring you to the next page. The fact that it is hyperjust means it is not linear à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬  i.e. you can go to any place on the Internet whenever you want by clicking on links à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬  there is no set order to do things in. Markupis whatHTML tagsdo to the text inside them. They mark it as a certain type of text (italicizedtext, for example). HTML is aLanguage, as it has code-words and syntax like any other language. Example: html head about authors /head title First Page /title body h1 Hello this my Home page! /body /html Q: 3 Hanson websites are built to work for your business and are built on the concept of intelligent website. An intelligent website is more than just a brochure on the web. It allows you to edit the website yourself through a Content Management System (CMS). What is the need for an intelligent website? Ans: The need of intelligent website is to create the next generation products, services and frameworks though the research application and study of information technology and artificial intelligence. Following are the steps companies follow to increase their information. Basic Web traffic analysis Customer interaction analysis Real-timepersonalization Getting tofine-grainedsegmentation Going through the streams of clicks Enrich content with external data Reaching optimal intelligence. 1. Basic Web traffic analysis: In this step it analyze the Web traffic this provides the information of records of entry the duration of viewed, exit point into a web or pages the link they follow. 2. Customer interaction analysis: This step is used to collect more information about the customerà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s interactions with the website. Registered users through this registration process, the site is able to get information related to both the demographics and preference. This type of data is used to help inform personalization engines to serve the contents according to the visitorà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s interests. 3. Real-timepersonalization: Personalization is the ultimate realization of the one-to-one marketing dream. Four ways of personalization includes. Greetings: This is a more general way of personalization. The customer is greeted by name and welcomed back whenever he or she visits the site. Customization: It allows a customer to tailor the service he or she receives from an e-commerce site Recommendation: t was based only on the preferences that a customer would have explicitly expressed during registration. Now, it can be done in real time and predicted automatically by the personalization engine using different types of information such as observed real-time behavior, purchase histories and expressed preferences. Customization: It allows a customer to tailor the service he or she receives from an e-commerce site. 4. Getting to fine-grained segmentation: This step also uses artificial intelligence to conduct knowledge discovery. That is, it can look for patterns in large data sets and identify common elements. 5. Going through the streams of clicks: Click-stream information is the recording of every page request from every visitor by the website owners. This information is stored into massive log files. 6. Enrich content with external data: Once a customer performs a number of purchases, the website is able to further enhance the customerà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s profile. Demographic data from third party providers may be added to the profile to provide a richer view of the customer base. 7. Reaching optimal intelligence: A company can reach optimal intelligence once it is able to combine historical transaction records, observed behaviour via click-stream data and preferences expressed in online surveys. Q: 4 when a data is sent across the network it is encrypted and arrang ed in a way that even if there is a diversion in the flow of data should not leak the data. At the reception it is decrypted and actual data is obtained. Explain the different methods of encryption technique. Ans: Encryption is a method by which plaintext can be converted into cipher text. There are three types of cryptography or methods of encryption: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Secret key or private key or symmetric key cryptography à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Public key or asymmetric key cryptography à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Hash function 1. Secret key or symmetric key cryptography In this scheme, both the sender and the recipient possess the same key to encrypt and decrypt the data. Figure 8.1 shows how secret or private key cryptography works. Data Encryption Standard Data Encryption Standard (DES) is an example of secret key cryptography. It was developed by IBM. DES is block cipher-based scheme which encrypts a 64-bit data block using a 56-bit key. The block is transformed in such a w ay that it involves sixteen iterations. Drawbacks of secret key cryptography à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Both parties must agree upon a shared secret key. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢If there are n correspondents, you have to keep track of n different secret keys. If the same key is used by more than one correspondent, the common key holders can read each otherà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s mail. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Symmetric encryption schemes are also subject to authenticity problems. Since both the sender and the recipient have the same secret key, the identity of originator or recipient cannot be proved. Both can encrypt or decrypt the message. 2. Triple Encryption DES is considered unsafe for various applications primarily due to the 56-bit key size which is too small. Triple DES is considered as an improved version to overcome many of the shortcomings of DES. The triple encryption technology is based on DES and is sometimes referred as Triple DES or 3DES. The event follows an Encrypt-Decrypt-Encr ypt (EDE) sequence. Decrypt sequence is just the same encrypting operation with the keys reversed. It is based on the DES algorithm and can easily modify the existing software to use Triple DES. It has a longer key length that helps in eliminating many of the shortcut attacks used to reduce the amount of time it takes to break DES. Triple DES mode of operation takes three 64-bit keys for an overall key length of 192 bits. In Private Key Encryption, the user can just type in the complete 192-bit (24 character) key rather than entering each of the three keys individually. The procedure for encryption is exactly the same as regular DES, but it is repeated three times. The data is encrypted with the first key, decrypted with the second key and finally encrypted again with the third key 3. Public key cryptography This scheme operates on a double key, called pair key, one of which is used to encrypt the message and the other is used to decrypt it. This can be viewed as two parts ; one part of the key pair, the private key, is known only by the designated owner. The other part, the public key, is published widely but is still associated with the owner of the private key. HASH function Hash function is a formula that converts a message of a given length into a string of digits called a message digest. Q: 5 explain different kinds of electronic payments system in detail. Ans: Electronic payment system An electronic payment system is an online business process that enables fund transfer through an electronic medium such as personal computers and mobile phones. Types of Electronic Payment Systems (EPS) There are three main categories of EPS. 1. Banking and Financial Payments Large-scaleor whole payment (e.g.,bank-to-banktransaction) Small-scaleor retail payment (e.g., ATM) Home banking (e.g., bill payment) 2. Retail Payments Credit cards (VISA or Master cards) Private label credit/debit cards (e.g., JC Penny cards) Charges cards (e.g., American Express) 3. Onlinee-commercePayments This category is again divided into two types: (i)Electronictoken-basedpayment system Electronic cash (e.g., DigiCash) Electronic cheques (e.g., NetCheque) Smart cards or debit cards (e.g., Mondexe-currencycards) (ii)Creditcard-basedpayment systems Encrypted credit cards (wwwform-basedencryption) Third-partyauthorization number (e.g., First Virtual Electronic cards: Electronic cards are designed to reflect your bank, financial and retail payments. By having one, it means that you definitely do not need to visit your bank physically in order to access your account. Mostly cut out of hard plastic material to make them durable, the cards will have a magnet trip that allows the machines to be able to gain access to your bank account electronically. They will come in three major types, the debit card, the credit card and the prepaid card. All that the vender has to do is to swap your card across the payment system where a message will be sent to your bank and immediately reply with a confirmation message. All this is done in a matter of seconds Online e-commerce Payments: This kind of payment system is slowly on the rise. We can attribute this to the increase of online shopping. Having an online account with either PayPal money bookers and or any provider allows you to be able to transfer funds more quickly as there are no restrictions and limitations on what you can do with your electronic money. One can be able to access their online accounts through their phones and or computers. These accounts are so simple to use. Q: 6 we know that there are various internet services which help us to make the use of network efficiently. Being a regular user of the various services without probably, knowing the technical aspects explain those services in details with an example. Ans: internet services an organization that provides an information service over the Internet. Examples are search engines, cloud storage services and application service providers. Following services that are available on the Net: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢World Wide Web à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢E-mail à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢File Transfer Protocol à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Telnet à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Web Chat à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Online Service à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¢Instant Messaging World Wide Web World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents a ccessed via the Internet. E.g. www. Ikea.com Electronic Mail E-mail is any method of digitally creating, transmitting or storing human communication that is primarily textual. SMTP was first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. However, e-mail soon became à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‹Å"network e-mailà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢. By 1966, messages could be exchanged between different computers. The creation of ARPANET in 1969 made a very significant contribution to the development of e-mail and one report indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson started the use of the [email  protected]/* */ sign which separates the user name from their machine name E-mail system work. The model on which a modern e-mail system works is the store-and-forward model. E-mails could only send or receive text messages composed in the ASCII character set. Example hotmail, yahoo etc. File Transfer Protocol (FTP): It is a network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network such as the Internet. Special FTP software is required to connect to an FTP site and download and upload files. Both commercial and free FTP software programs are available. The following information is required to connect to an FTP site: 1. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‹Å"Server addressà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢ or à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‹Å"hostnameà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢: The network address of the computer you want to connect to; for example, FTP.MYFTPSITE.COM. 2. Username and password: These are the credentials you use to access the specific files on the computer you wish to connect to. Telnet: It is a network protocol used on the Internet or in LAN connections, it was developed in 1969, technology with which a user can get access to a command line interface on a remote machine. telnet castor Trying 129.215.112.8 Connected to castor.ucs.ed.ac.uk. Escape character is ^]. SunOS UNIX (castor) login: Web Chat: Web chat allows users to communicate with one a nother in real time through Web interfaces. A Web browser is the only requirement to be able to chat on the Web. HTML pages came with their disadvantages as well, the main one being their interactivity. Every HTML message required a form to be submitted and a page to be loaded. There were delays in receiving messages and page flicker because of frequent page reloads. As a result, the use of HTML chat sites reduced. Java applet technology was introduced in 1995, Advanced network and graphical capabilities. But Java too had its own problemsà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å"long initial page loading time Newer technologies have been in use since 2005, Ajax and Flash Online se s a generic term that describes any company, organization or group that provides an online service. These types of services may include Web sites, discussion forums, chat rooms, or Web mail. OSPs may also refer to a company that provides dial-up access to the Internet service example C Online service: Online services provide an infrastructure in which subscribers can communicate with one another, either by exchanging e-mail messages or by participating in online conferences (forums). In addition, the service can connect users with an almost unlimited number of third-party information providers. Subscribers can get up-to-date stock quotes, news stories hot off the wire, articles from many magazines and journals, in fact, almost any information that has been put in electronic form. Of course, accessing all this data carries a price. Instant messaging: A type of communications service that enables you to create a kind of private chat room with another individual in order to communicate in real time over the Internet