Exploring Service Quality In E-Commerce: Strategies, Security Measures - Essay.

Discuss About The Exploring The Service Quality In E-Commerce.

Strategies for Building Successful E-Commerce Business

The most efficient and effective way for doing business in this modern era is with the help of internet and computer technology. The internet provides a vast platform for all kinds of business to flourish and make profit. E-commerce refers to the process of selling and buying things online and E-business is the process of taking part in various kinds of activities that a business can participate in for making profit (Barnes and Hunt 2013). E-business and E-commerce helps a company to spread its business to new markets, increase the sales by reaching new market and customers. E-commerce has become enormously feasible for business and very appropriate for consumers. Selling and purchasing has become easy for consumers and producers with the introduction of E-commerce because of the introduction of various security plans and topologies (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). The internet marketing strategies involved in building a successful business over the internet are advertising, promotion, public relations and sales. The product is made aware to the customers and potential clients with the help of advertising. But for marketing over the internet, it acts as means for finding new methods to manage traffic, or visitors to the website. This type of advertising takes place in various forms: links attached on other websites, banner ads, and PPC (pay-per-click) ads.

The second step involves the promotion of the website to stay in touch with the customer needs and demands. This is the method of keeping the company, services, or products in the knowledge of the customers. This generates the demand of the products. Promotion includes advertising as well as public relations, publicity, and sales. Promotion is generally done using sales efforts, proposing a free information product, press issues, or writing directed email campaigns and some of the promotion is done offline (Mazzarol 2015). Public relations establishment is the next step involved in building a successful online business. Public relations helps in establishing brand image of the company, create good relation with the public. The foremost important thing to do for creating good relations with the public is to create a website that reaches out to the customers and makes a good impression. It also involves representation of the organisation in the media. It is required to reach out to the press and notify the press of the strengths and interests of the organisation in a way that makes the best impact. This is also necessary to clarify the answers and doubts about the products and services of the organisation. Sales is the process of agreeing on terms, locating and informing of the products to the customers. It is required for an online organisation to help the customers finding the company. Actively marketing the company, services and the products to reach the customers is the effective method to make sales. The basic strategies involved in successful establishment of a company are:

1. Determining the measurable goals of the strategies.
2. Establishment of a calendar and the milestones that are to be reached.  
3. Decision of the quantitative and qualitative goals (Chaffey 2015).

E-Commerce Security Measures

Figure 1: (E BUSINESS BUILDING STRATEGIES)

(Source: Mazzarol 2015 )

The protection and securing of assets involved in the e-commerce of a company from unauthorised users is known as e-commerce security. Common security threats involved in e-commerce are phishing threats, data misuse, money thefts, credit card frauds, unprotected services and hacking (Laudon and Traver 2013). Inaccurate management creates the way for major security threats in an e-commerce business. If poor quality antiviruses are installed in the system then it can be a cause for security breaches. One more security threat is the threat of price manipulation. Price manipulation allows an unauthorised user to install or slide a significant lower prices into the URL and steal all the data.  Another kind of e-commerce threat is snowshoe spam. Snowshoe spam is a spam that is sent by a user and not by any system. These kinds of spams are very difficult for the anti-spam software to detect and protect the system from these kinds of spams. The most harmful threat for a e-commerce website is the threat of malicious codes (Niranjanamurthy and Chahar 2013). This type of threat generally involves worms, viruses and Trojan horses. Viruses are codes that corrupt the files on a website and damage the normal working state of a computer. Worms are directly placed through the internet and it can affect millions of systems in a small period of time. Trojan horses are the programming codes with destructive functions. These types of codes sneaks into the system when a user downloads something from the internet. E-Commerce security states the principles with the help of which, safe transactions are carried out in the electronic platform, allows selling and buying of services and goods over the internet using safety protocols that are placed to ensure safety and security of the transactions. Some of the basics of eCommerce security are Privacy, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. Privacy involves the situation in which, there is no sharing of information with unauthorised users and parties. When a transaction is carried out by any user, there should complete privacy to the personal details, which is only shared with the seller with whom the transaction takes place. E-Commerce sites are responsible for providing minimum encryption, protection from viruses and firewalls to protect the details of bank of the users and credit card details of the users. The idea of integrity is one of the important as it provides the guarantee that none of the data that is shared online are altered in any ways. It states that unchanged data are included in a secure transaction and the e-commerce business is only using what was only entered in the internet site by a buyer. Authentication is very important while conducting business online as it proves that the company that is selling is real, the authenticity of the products are determined and a sale will take place as it has been described online (Turban et al. 2017). A proof of identification is also required so that a merchant can feel secured about a sale. Additional credit card PINs and customer logins and passwords are the solutions to provide authenticity to an online transaction. The commonly used online payment systems are bank payments, PayPal, Paymentwall, Google Wallet, Wallets for Mobile Money, Braintree and Stripe (Zhou 2013).

Strategies for Enhancing E-Commerce Services

Figure 2: (E-COMMERCE SECURITY)

(Source: Laudon and Traver 2013)

Some of the basic strategies involved in enhancing the online services of a merchant, opening new markets and increasing profits are:

Expansion into international markets: with the propagation of computer systems and internet technology, consumers all across the globe has an access to the products that were very hard to procure in the past as these products are not local or regional. The major keys for successful eCommerce internationally are Fraud Detection and Handling, Legal and Regulatory Issues and Currency Concerns. Frauds can turn out to be costly, and the reputation with the customers can be damaged. The most effective way to protect a business from payment fraud is by using payment processor, which has capabilities of strong fraud management and it also has an ability to make risk scoring on foreign transactions (Fang). The company has to meet the local regulations of the countries they are trying to conduct business. These laws includes handling returns, payment processing, reporting of transactions and collection of Value Added Taxes. As it is not possible for merchants to be expert in laws and regulations of every country, the merchants depend on global payment processors, which are capable of processing payments all over the world (Fang et al. 2014).

Offering more methods of payment to more consumers: the key factor in a online transaction is the payment process. In all shopping environments, consumers places a higher value on choices, security and convenience. The shoppers in online platform want greater flexibility on decision of the payment method at checkout. There is an increase in the value of average order when a customers has a variety of payment options as they offer the customers entrance to some additional credit sources. The reduction of total cost of payments is provided as some new opportunites are offered by some extra payment choices. Lower transaction charges than credit and debit are incurred by some payment choices and merchants have the opportunity for optimization of their payment mix by encouraging online shoppers to use lower cost payment mechanisms (Savrul, Incekara and Sener 2014).

Protection of eCommerce bottom line: the threat of online fraud costs huge capitals for the merchants. Back-office and costs of personnel, which are associated with online fraud management are continuing to grow. Fraud detection at the time of checkout is very important to provide security to the details of the customers. Obtaining authorization from card association is included in high level fraud processing. Purchase habits and the patterns of shopping of the shoppers needs to be examined regularly for any abnormalities. Large online merchants employ security of sizeable amount and technical employees for fighting frauds, develop and implement of outside expertise for detection of fraud and programs for prevent fraud (Veit et al. 2014).

E-Commerce Marketing

Leveraging the intelligence of business:online businesses has the ability to collect thorough information of the visiting frequency of the customers. The merchants of online business can monitor the products that an individual purchase, view the information of the pages that they visit, time duration that is spent on a website and the regularity of the customers of abandoning shopping carts. Payment processors offers a wide range of business analytic tools and reporting. It enables the merchants to leverage some powerful capabilities, which includes dashboard reporting, Key Performance Reporting (KPI), transaction query, chargeback analysis, return analysis, interchange analysis and payment method analysis (Scarborough 2016).

Figure 3: (E-COMMERCE BUSINESS STRATEGIES)

(Source: Savrul, Incekara and Sener 2014)

Ecommerce marketing is the method of increasing sales with the help of awareness raising about a brand in the online store and the offerings of the product. Some of the ecommerce marketing channels involved are

1. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC): an effective campaign includes strategic bidding of the keywords or the phrases used in the creation of ads. Search engines make revenue on a per-click basis, while imprints are determined with the help of query of user search (Shim et al. 2013).
2. Search engine marketing (SEM): this refers to professional advertising campaigns. This is used by the marketers for describing all the paid and organic efforts. It is also used for describing efforts on the Google’s Adwords platform and all paid platform on some other search engines like Bing (Mittal 2013).
3. Search engine optimisation (SEO): SEO traffic creates unpaid, organic results across some search engines such as Yahoo and Google. A successful SEO is combined with adherence with best practices on product level in tandem  along with creation of content, inbound links, engagement on social media and some other factors, which are taken into contemplation  by the algorithms of search engines.
4. Display advertising: this refers to the advertising using sidebars, banners and some other predominant graphic advertisements which appears on various other websites. These ad are facilitated by ad networks like Google Display Network (Jahanshahi, Zhang and Brem 2013).
5. Affiliate marketing: the reviews, testimonials and comparisons and reviews are leveraged using affiliate marketing for driving traffic to a website of online retailer. For receiving set commission for denoted sales, traffic is received from some above channels and loyal following is sustained.

eCommerce advertising is generally conducted using online media and other various paid websites. Some of the popular used methods of eCommerce advertising are:

PPC (pay-per-view): This advertising method enables the merchants to advertise on other websites and among various search results. When a visitor visits the website and clicks on the ad, then the visitor is directed to that specific website and the merchant is charged. The merchants pay significant amount of money to post their ad of on some other website and higher the bid, higher the position of the ad in the website of the search results page.

CPM (cost per mile): in this type of advertising, the merchant is charged on the basis of the display of the ad on the website and not on the basis of the frequency of visitors clicking on the ad. It is often used for creating awareness or building brands or introduction of new concepts.

Advertising on Facebook: Facebook allows to create both PPC and CPM advertisements, which are intended to target individuals on the basis of data that they have provided about individuals. Facebook creates a more targeted advertising environment. The social media interface makes the ads more particular (Chen et al. 2015).

Advertisement on Youtube: the methods for advertisement on youtube includes ads in branded video channel, videos promoted by youtube, ads embedded in youtube video. With the help of advertisement on a branded channel in youtube, merchants can post contents that are targeted to engage consumers and direct traffic to the website of the merchant. It creates the option to post ads, videos, or any other content related to the website of the merchant.

Figure 4: (E-COMMERCE MARKETING)

(Source: Mittal 2013)

Social marketing: as consumers are socially connected using technology, it is easier for the customers to transmit and receive information easily and more instantaneously.  Consumers do not tend to look at the brands before buying a product, they rather take consultancy from any third party source and other sources from the social media networks. Creation of fan base and a high level of trust needs to be established with the fans and followers for effective utilizing the marketing in social media. After this step is successfully achieved, concrete goals for evaluation of the social media program needs to be conceived and effective methods need for measuring these goals need to be built (Fulgoni 2015).

Mobile marketing: the technological advances that allows the consumers to shop on the smart mobile devices created more mobility of the consumers. This kind of marketing is growing at an exponential rate. This term refers to the marketing that is targeted at the cell phones, tablets and smartphones. Some of the common methods used in mobile marketing used are:

1. SMS and MMS messaging: the merchants of a ecommerce business can contact the customers through text messages and multimedia messages. This method can be  implemented by using text message software.
2. marketing on mobile search and in applications: the method of displaying the ads of the website on the mobile applications and alongside the search results on the searches that are conducted on the mobile phones. This method can be implemented using Google Adowords, Admob, Cellit (Lamberton and Stephen 2016.).
3. Creation of mobile website: recent statistics shows that mobile web traffic will be increased by a significant rate with the increase in tablet computer and smartphones usage (Gulbahar and Yildirim 2015). Mobile marketing is effective for the quick exposure for brand awareness and promotions. Mobile markets reaches out to the people faster when there is no exposure to the social media fan base.

Local marketing:  As the largest contributor to a business are a local customer base, listed locally is also incredibly important. Local business and local marketing is connected as the consumers tend to search for local businesses on the mobile devices. This is an effective technique if a business is located in a metropolitan area with the intention of getting more traffic to the physical location of the business. Platforms based on locations are driven by promotional offer, where a company provides an opportunity to the consumers to rate, comment and share the personal experiences with the business. Some of the platforms are Yelp, Around Me and SCVNGR. Local marketing is an effective method of marketing as local relevancy increases the consumer attention in receiving posts, which is quite the opposite of the usual reaction of the consumers when they receive junk mail advertisings (Scott 2015).

E-commerce retailing refers to the direct sale of information, products and services with the help of stores that are virtually available on the web, which is designed with auction sites and electronic catalogue. This is a B2C (Business to Customer) model of business that performs a transaction between the businessman and the consumer, B2C means business that sells the products or provides services to end-user consumers. E-Commerce services includes Development, Marketing, Creative and Technology (Schniederjans, Cao and Triche 2013).

Development services includes Web and Mobile development, CMS customization, system integration, custom data reporting and social and mobile applications. Optimized e-Commerce applications and portals are developed to provide the customers a unified shopping experience on multiple devices. CMS customization helps in strong back-end administration and make it efficient and easier for the customers to shop online. Systems integration involves integration of CRM, finance and inventory systems, ERP and system for order management to ensure complete efficiency and accuracy (Vanelslander, Deketele and Van Hove 2013). Custom data reporting provides insight to the customer habits and performance of the website to enable a strategy for profits. Social and mobile applications empowers to leverage social media networks and mobile devices for providing a better personalized and satisfied experience in shopping.

Market services includes Search engine optimizations, email marketing, web analytics, social media management and marketplace management. Search engine optimization improves the site visibility on the search engines and helps in generating leads. Email marketing helps in capitalizing the data of the sales using effective email campaigns such as shopping cart emails, subscription emails, emails for promotion, and emails that are based on the shopping history of the consumer. Web analytics provides an insight to the number of visitors on the website and the views of the page. It helps in assess the traffic on the web and improves the online performance of the business (Lin et al. 2016). Social media management assists in leveraging social media sites that are used to expand the brand visibility, increase in customer base and turning potential customers into fans. Marketplace management includes managing of transactions, inventory, communications, statistics of the sales and order reports that are related to e-Commerce.

Creative services includes web design, digital advertising and catalog production. Web design helps in creating appealing and interesting websites for increasing the traffic volume and the rates of conversion. Digital advertising delivers promotional messages and advertisements to the customers. Catalog production helps in creating captivating, updated and clearly organized products catalogs for imparting maximum impact on the customers.

Technology services includes payment processing, PCI compliance, website performance and data security. Payment processing refers to the development and implementation of safe and secure payment handling to ensure safety of data and personal details. PCI compliance is required to make the transaction between the customers and the website secured against any transactional fraud. Website performance is required to maintain a fast and easily accessible website for the users so there is a positive impact of the website on the minds of the customers. Data security provides advanced safety procedures, strong database design, anti-hacking technologies and antivirus that enables a safeguard to the website (Xu, Benbasat and Cenfetelli 2013).

Figure 5: (E-COMMERCE RETAILING)

(Source: Scott 2015)

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Fang, Y., Qureshi, I., Sun, H., McCole, P., Ramsey, E. and Lim, K.H., 2014. Trust, satisfaction, and online repurchase intention: The moderating role of perceived effectiveness of e-commerce institutional mechanisms. Mis Quarterly, 38(2).

Fulgoni, G.M., 2015. How Brands Using Social Media Ignite Marketing and Drive Growth: Measurement of Paid Social Media Appears Solid But Are the Metrics for Organic Social Overstated?. Journal of Advertising Research, 55(3), pp.232-236.

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