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Introduction 3
About Amazon.com 3
E-Commerce Solution Key Elements of Amazon.com 4
Technology Infrastructure 4
Datawarehouse and DataMining 6
Datamining to operational efficiency and acheiving sales goals 6
Network Security Threats in E-Commerce Applications 7
Controlling Network Security Threats in E-Commerce Applications 8
Payment Gateway 9
Conclusion 9
Reference 11
Introduction
E-Commerce is a present day business methodology addressing various needs of organizations. It enables consumers and merchants to reduce costs and simultaneously improving on the quality of products and services. It enables high-speed service and delivery. E-Commerce is enabled with the development and growth of internet technology. It is managed through open network, online transactions and supports implementation of various business process. It allows companies to merge business processes by utilizing the internet technologies. Companies empowered through e-commerce conduct their business over extranets, intranet, and the Internet. It enabled businesses to reduce their costs, reach newer markets and develop deep customer relationships. Through E-Commerce, it is possible to do purchasing, consultancy financial services, advertising, commodities payment. As a result, E-Commerce is an open trade on the internet. E-commerce applications are categories into different types
B2B – Business to Business E-commerce
B2C – Business to Consumer
C2C-Consumer to Consumer
B2E – Business to Employee
C2B-Consumer to Business
G2G- Government to Government
In this study, we examine the capabilities of online retail company Amazon.com
About Amazon.com
Amazon is the biggest online retailer across the globe. It consists of over forty categories of products that range from electronics to groceries to books to auto parts and jewelry. The company is also an e-commerce and Internet technology platform. It consists of a logistics platform, an Internet advertising platform, a search technology, and also acts as an Internet startup incubator.
Amazon started with books and then expanded into other goods and services. Amazon built a largely successful online retail business.
E-Commerce Solution Key Elements of Amazon.com
The key elements for the Amazon e-commerce solution are
a. Easy-to-use and an attractive user interface.
b. Fast and trustworthy delivery. Connected and automated warehouses.
c. A no-nonsense return policy.
d. Allow customer reviews for products and services.
e. Suggestions based on previous purchases.
The above measure holds true for any e-commerce based solution. Amazon does a fantastic measure of revenue-per-visitor. This is a key measure for any commercial e-commerce based website.
Technology Infrastructure
Amazon.com has gained an advantage over its competitors by enhancing its technology. It has put a significant focus on its online channels by investing in the e-commerce model. The model consists of applications for validating and accepting and placing customer orders, tracking the orders with suppliers, and managing the inventory for ensuring on time shipment of products. The transaction-processing system manages millions of transactions, status inquiries, gift-wrapping requests, and multiple shipment addresses and methods. The systems enable customers to define their choices for shipments. The management of charging and authorizing customer credit cards is done through these applications. The ecosystem of applications also consists of an automated system for email optimization and measurement and a campaign calendar. The system does the following activities automatically:
• Optimize content for improving user experience
• Does not send e-mail campaigns that have high unsubscribe rates and low clickthrough.
• Does inbox management by avoiding multiple emails in a week.
The automated system of bidding and search advertising for paid search has contributed significantly to Amazon. Initially, a human interface was used for Sponsored links. Given the high range of products it was virtually impossible and unsustainable too to manage. The automated system created keywords, creative ad and also determine the best landing page. It also manages the bids and measure the conversion rate and profit per visitor.
Figure: Real time operations and collective intelligence in e-commerce model.
Source: (Ecommerce-digest.com, 2014)
Datawarehouse and DataMining
E-commerce is a significant province for data mining, which deals with large amounts of transactional data and clickstream. To develop a system of data mining, experts have to work from the basic initial level that include data collection, transformation, designing of a data warehouse, and linked business intelligence systems. Business intelligence system involves reporting and visualization. The formation of data warehouse needs a crucial data transformation from an operative system that is also named as ‘On-Line Transaction Processing’ or OLTP. It is estimated that nearly 80% of the time to accomplish an analysis is used up in data transformation. Sometimes it is the work of days, in comparison of several months of effort for regular Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tools. Through automatic manifestation of data from a website into data warehouse, the continuance expenses could be considerably reduced. Thus, a bulky database entails a high-quality Database Administrator (DBA). Data mining has a miraculous impression with improbable expectations about its fastness just like push a button and insight will flow out.It takes highly skilled people to do data mining successfully. Several methodologies related to data mining are useful such as CRISP-DM.
Datamining to operational efficiency and achieving sales goals
Elementary figures are constructive in acquiring an overview of the data and for recognizing anomalies, though it is a complicated task. It demands skills and experience. However, initiating on the basis of queries specified by the users is a practical and superior approach to developing apt models. For a data analyst, creating models and identifying fresh insight is always an interesting part throughout any analysis project. Realistic data mining development occupy data gathered at various levels of granularity. It requires full attention and one has to be very patient while developing predictive models. The definitive goal of a data analysis projects is to employ the insights and model to perk up the business. The biggest challenge of data mining field is a call for time reduction and analytical proficiency that is required to investigate the data. Sanctioning business users to execute their analysis would partially deal with this issue.
1. Share the results among business users through simple, easy to use reports. A
browser based business intelligence tool is a method of choice.
2. Offer canned reports that should be simple and can be run by business users smoothly denoting values for some parameters for instance date ranges. This also endows with a method that facilitate business users to alter the behaviors of data mining analysis in better-controlled ways.
3. Technically knowledgeable business users may be comfortable designing their investigation. In the viewpoint of business intelligence, this idea is extremely successful.
Network Security Threats in E-Commerce Applications
Organizations using the Internet network security as a major concern, followed by unstable and slow internet connections.
For any e-commerce application following network security issues needs to be addressed:
1) Malicious Code: Viruses, Worms, Trojan Horses and Bots.
2) Unwanted Programs: These are programs like Adware, Spyware and browser parasites that are installed without the user’s consent.
3) Phishing and Identity Theft: A attempt to obtain confidential information examples include e-mail scam letter.
4) Hacking and Cyber vandalism: Unauthorized access to systems with criminal or disrupting intent.
Transaction security is an important factor for any e-commerce business. The security of information and that of the systems are both necessary. Another threat with e-commerce websites as with other websites is the DoS or Denial of Service attack.
Controlling Network Security Threats in E-Commerce Applications
The various ways to control security threats are discussed below.
Information Validation: Information transaction integrity and confidentially, repudiation of information and authenticity of the information. A successful E-commerce business is essentially factored on organizations’ overall reputation, product quality and price and a secure interrelated data.
Development of Security mechanism to E-Commerce: E-Commerce security technologies are into two categories:
Data Encryption Technology: Symmetric Key Encryption, Asymmetric Key Encryption
Secure Socket Layer: A Common form of securing TCP/IP channels.
Digital Signature: Digital signature is unique to each person encrypted with their private keys.
Secure Electronic Transaction (SET): Defining a SET specification for debit/credit card transactions.
Privacy Policy Statements: A contractual commitment with consumers for information use.
Digital Certificate: A digital document issued by trusted Certification Authority (CA).
Hash Code Encryption: Utilizes hash algorithm method to determine the authenticity of messages. It consists of below technologies
a) Authentication Technology
b) Digital Signature Technology
Payment Gateway
Payment gateway is an application that enables the website to support client payment through the website. Payment gateways make the online transactions secure. There are two major categories which are Hosted and Shared Gateways. Hosted Payment Gateways direct users away from the website. Some of the popular payment gateways are PayPal, 2CO, WorldPay and MoneyBookers.
Advantages
Guaranteed fraud protection Mechanisms.
Customer personal data protection:
Multicurrency payment processing
Ease of access and use
Relatively good rates on money transfer
Conclusion
The e-commerce industry is facing a challenging future in terms of safety threats that must be avoided. The rapid growth in technological knowledge and accessibility of internet is increasing the security concerns. Criminal minds are getting more sophisticated and treacherous in fraud and violence. Therefore, multiple security strategies exist that any E-Commerce contributor can activate to diminish these risks and negotiate significantly. Risk consciousness, comprehensive and open seclusion policies, strong authorizations and verification and encryption technologies will help to run risk-free business forever.
Successfully implementing security technologies into a trusted communication is the input to guarantee a secure e-commerce, which is the first step of establishing trust. Several recommendations are in practice for a long time to run a successful e-business that include:
1. Integration of data collection and operations for better analytics.
2. Always keeping the end users in focus.
3. Providing easy to use reports and visualizations.
Reference
Garg, A., Gupta, A. and Bansal, R. (2012). Learning Paradigm to Develop Secure E-Commerce System. ANVESHANAM-A NATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS, 1(1).
Ecommerce-digest.com, (2014). Collective Intelligence in Action. [online] Available at: http://www.ecommerce-digest.com/realtime-systems.html [Accessed 29 Oct. 2014].
Kohavi, R., Mason, L., Parekh, R., & Zheng, Z. (2004). Lessons and challenges from mining retail e-commerce data. Machine Learning, 57(1-2), 83-113.
Rane, P. and Meshram, B. (2012). Transaction Security for E-commerce Application. IJECSE-ISSN-2277-1956.
