Ebay: Architecture And Challenges - An Essay On E-Commerce Giant" (70 Characters)

This assignment is intended to allow you to explore a topic in information systems (IS) that is of interest to you. Whether you are simply curious about an emerging trend, a particular type of IS, an IS related process, or wish to explore a practical problem in the work place related to IS, it is my hope that this project will provide you with the opportunity to further your IS knowledge and competence.

You may choose to complete this assignment in one of three ways:

1.Complete a research project on an IS topic of your choice

2.Conduct a research project in an organization using IS

3.Critically review a book related to IS

Each of these options is described in more detail below. Please note that all projects require instructor approval.

The deliverable in all cases will consist of a report due at the end of term and worth 10% of your final grade.

If you choose the research project option, your principal task will be to learn about IS through a review of articles reported in academic journals, industry paper, or the popular/trade press (a list of potential sources is included at the end of this document). Your project may focus on a particular type of IS (e.g. e-commerce applications, accounting IS, etc.), an IS related process (e.g. project management, vendor selection, outsourcing, etc.), a particular group of stakeholders (e.g. end-users, managers, etc) or an emerging trend (e.g. cloud computing). It should be structured as to best fulfill your interests and need for knowledge. Depending on your current level of familiarity with the domain of interest, you may choose to explore the topic in a broad or more focused manner.

At a minimum, your project should include the following:

• A clear statement of your learning goals for this project
• A description of the IS or IS-related process of interest
• A balanced assessment of the benefits & challenges of the IS
• A summary of relevant research literature, including theoretical perspectives
• A succinct summary of what you learnt

The typical study will have the following objectives:

1) Analyze an IS that has been implemented in the past two-three years

2) Provide a description of the system, its function(s) and the process, activities and challenges involved in the development, acquisition or adoption/use of the system

3) An analysis of what happened. E.g. what did the organization do well/poorly? What measures might have facilitated or improved the process? What insights can you gain from theories of information systems? What have you learnt from your involvement in this project?

4) The implications for users, management, customers and the organization from the perspective of its business processes

5) Apply theoretical knowledge from the course to your analysis of what transpired in the organization you chose to study

6) Place the study in a broader context by addressing:

• the industry in which the company operates
• the kind of information system you are studying and the reasons organizations adopt them

The e-commerce has been the most popular and effective way for buying and selling products and services over the internet. Such website showcase thousands of products along with details of the products with eye-catching price tags. The e-commerce websites not only used by the customers to buy products, many SME also sell and promote their products in the websites. Additionally, such websites also enables C2C and B2C e-commerce and ebay is one of the biggest player in this game where not only does the common public have a way to give-and-take surpluses, but businesses today can effectively improve online dissemination centers to extend their range and evade distributors.

EBay is a multinational e-commerce corporation established in 1995 by the Pierre Omidyar. It was first introduced as auction site. Later it evolves to a full-fledged e-commerce website and gain popularity worldwide.  Users can browse ebay.com to view products and buy their desired product or post some item to sell. Users can pay though online or cash on delivery by debit or credit cards. Like almost every e-commerce website it is also constructed utilizing distributed object technology (Haucap & Heimeshoff, 2014). This is used to provide high availability, high scalability and high performance. It is also required to store a huge volume of data in their database and also must be respond quickly when respond needed. Today, the eBay has more than 177 million registered user and they spend huge amount of the time as it has become a popular destination for shopping on the internet. The charts shows the count fo registered user against the years.

Other than managing the vast amount of users they also deals with more than 44 billion sql execution every day, 100,000+ lines of code are added every two weeks, 30,000 software builds per week, 30 Software Architects in its employ, handles 4.4 billion API calls per month, nearly 10,000 live applications and over 1 Billion photos. The above statics gives the idea about enormous scale of the ebay platform and the key attributes necessary to launch its high availability, manageability and most of all its scalability.

As shown in the above diagram, the overview of the platform is very simple but actually it is opposite of that as the architectural design is also based on the system architecture along with the software architecture. It is because in their platform not only web clients and web server is involved, transaction servers, proxy servers, application server, security server, and database. An architectural diagram is shown in the figure 3 which has 3-tier along with web-enabled browser, database, and transaction and application server layer. The relationship among the tiers are also established as well.

There are also several component model as transaction servers, proxy servers, application servers, security servers, databases, Web clients and web servers. Some of the key attributes are explained. Firstly, web browsers for modifiability where end users interact with the system and it supports wide variety of UI for different browser support and hardware as well. When users send request through their web browser, the request comes as https which provide high security as users personal information along with the transaction details can be stored on the requests (Kauffman & Chircu, 2013). HTTP is comprised with a sub protocol as secure socket layer which enables secure exchange of commercial information. When user send such request, it may reaches to the proxy servers first and data can be retrieved from the proxy as such information can be retrieved from the browser cache. However, when buying any item from eBay, real time respond is necessary. Next, the web server responds reaches to destination which are web server. Web servers has the ability to dispatch and handle requests while utilizing a poll of thread.

Overview of Ebay

Even though eBay is one of the big ecommerce corporation in the current market, they also faced some issue like controlling the shipping cost, credit card changes. MasterCard or visa r instance, if fuel charges increases I different regions that could impact the price factor for every product similarly if the transaction cost for online exchange is increased by the master card and visa that will also impact the price rate (Hui et al., 2016). Today, the eBay has more than 177  million registered user and they spend more a huge amount of the time as it has become a popular destination for shopping on the internet.

Ebay also have some weakness as well as they are unable to identify the frauds and vulnerability in their system. Their architecture is opened to third parties and several data breach cases also came to light.  The frauds are associated with counterfeit goods being marketed to unsuspecting users. In 2014, 145 million users of ebay was notified to change their password due certain cyber attack (Ye& Viswanathan, 2013). The attack was found by the ebay when they found that some of the registered credentials are comprised. They notified every customer to change their password. It is believed that the attackers wants to gain access to the corporate network of ebay.

There are several opportunities for the ebay to grow even more by adopting new business strategy. Ebay increases their focus on the service provider in last years unlike Amazon.

Finally, it can be concluded that eBay has become one of the popular e-commerce website. The e-commerce websites not only used by the customers to buy products, many SME also sell and promote their products in the websites. Additionally, such websites also enables C2C and B2C e-commerce and ebay is one of the biggest player in this game where not only does the common public have a way to give-and-take surpluses, but businesses today can effectively improve online dissemination centers to extend their range and evade distributors. There are several opportunities for the ebay to grow even more by adopting new business strategy as well.

References:

Haucap, J., & Heimeshoff, U. (2014). Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet driving competition or market monopolization?. International Economics and Economic Policy, 11(1-2), 49-61.

Van Der Heide, B., Johnson, B. K., & Vang, M. H. (2013). The effects of product photographs and reputation systems on consumer behavior and product cost on eBay. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 570-576.

Kauffman, R. J., & Chircu, A. N. (2013). Digital intermediation in electronic commerce: The eBay model. In E-commerce and V-business (pp. 63-84). Routledge.

Neto, J. Q. F., Bloemhof, J., & Corbett, C. (2016). Market prices of remanufactured, used and new items: Evidence from eBay. International Journal of Production Economics, 171, 371-380.

Hui, X., Saeedi, M., Shen, Z., & Sundaresan, N. (2016). Reputation and regulations: evidence from eBay. Management Science, 62(12), 3604-3616.

Ye, S., Gao, G., & Viswanathan, S. (2013). Strategic behavior in online reputation systems: evidence from revoking on eBay.

Liu, Z., Cao, Z., & Wong, D. S. (2013, November). Blackbox traceable CP-ABE: how to catch people leaking their keys by selling decryption devices on ebay. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security (pp. 475-486). ACM.