Ecommerce

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Open Source – For Robust E commerce Applications

To be successful and to stay competitive in the ever changing business world, a business should be able to adapt modern changes that should be applied. E commerce has been proven to be an effective way to help your business to achieve these goals. With proper marketing strategy and building a solid E Commerce application, these can be all possible. Web site plays a vital role in business. However, website should be meeting the business need. There are many ways to manage your web site. From


The Rise of NVIDIA

The_Rise_of_NVIDIANVIDIA needs no introduction at FiringSquad or anywhere else in the hardware industry. The company has become the poster child for consumer 3D graphics. Ever since the release of its RIVA 128 graphics card, NVIDIA has never let its momentum slow down.

When NVIDIA made its initial public offering three years ago, it was joining a club of only a handful public fabless graphics semiconductor companies: ATI, S3, Trident, Tseng Labs, Number Nine, Cirrus Logic, 3dfx, and 3Dlabs. We all watched as the company climbed through the ranks with the TNT, TNT2, GeForce, and GeForce2 line of graphics processors.

Big green juggernaut

Through aggressive product development, near-perfect execution, and very strong arms, NVIDIA rose to the top of the industry. Today, NVIDIA owns all of 3dfx's intellectual property, has numerous OEM PC deals and has recently become Apple's default high-performance desktop graphics provider. Soon we'll see the mobile GeForce2 Go shipping in laptops from Toshiba, and we can't forget the upcoming introduction of NVIDIA's next generation NV20 GPU. After that, NVIDIA can look forward to the launch of Xbox as well as its new line of motherboard chipsets.

How did NVIDIA grow to become the leader in its industry? Has NVIDIA made any mistakes? What technologies bridged the gap between the NV1 and the RIVA 128? What is NVIDIA's future strategy? Are there any cool random facts about NVIDIA that most people don't know? Do you think we'd be asking these questions if we didn't have the answers?

In the beginning

When the PC multimedia revolution was just starting, three industry veterans formed NVIDIA in January 1993. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA President and CEO, had been the Director of Coreware at LSI Logic's "system-on-a-chip" division. Curtis Priem, NVIDIA Chief Technical Officer, had been the architect for the first graphics processor for the PC, the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter, and more recently had developed the GX graphics chips at Sun Microsystems. Chris Malachowsky, VP of Hardware Engineering, was a Senior Staff Engineer for Sun Microsystems, Inc., and was co-inventor of the GX graphics architecture.

History of Internet Marketing

History_of_Internet_MarketingSpending on Internet advertising in 1996 totaled $301 million in the U.S. While significant compared to the zero dollars spent in 1994, the figure paled in comparison to the $175 billion spent on traditional advertising as a whole that year. As the number of Internet surfers continued to rise, however, interest in the Internet as a mass-media vehicle increased. Online advertising grew to an industry worth nearly $1 billion in 1997. The Internet became increasingly popular in the late 1990s, and the viability of the Internet as a marketing medium emerged as more than mere speculation. Millions of surfers logged on to the Web each day, and many businesses were determined to reach this new audience. Web sites emerged for companies in nearly every industry, ranging from household cleaning products and cosmetics to electronics and automobiles. At the same time, many firms realized that simply creating a Web site wasn't enough to create a solid Internet presence; they also needed to drive traffic either to their sites or to their specific advertisements.

For example, drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. launched an Internet marketing campaign designed to build brand awareness for Excedrin. For 30 days during the 1997 tax season, the firm proclaimed Excedrin to be the "tax headache medicine" on a variety of financial Web sites. To entice surfers to click on the advertisement, Bristol-Myers offered a free sample of Excedrin to anyone who entered their name and address. According to Business Week writer Linda Himelstein, "The response was as good as any elixir. In just one month, Bristol-Myers added 30,000 new names to its customer list—some 1,000 per day and triple the company's best-case scenario. What's more, the cost of obtaining those names was only half that of traditional marketing methods."

Hoping for similar results, many traditional firms began incorporating the Internet into their existing marketing plans. Even technology industry giants like IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. began dumping millions of dollars into Internet marketing efforts. Many smaller firms, including Internet upstarts, turned to highly trafficked sites like Internet portal Yahoo!, paying for advertisements such as banner bars. In fact, Yahoo! was one of the few Internet-based firms actually able to earn a profit from online advertising. By developing technology that allowed it to track a visitor's online activity and control what banner bars and button ads that visitor saw, Yahoo! was able to target its messages in a manner never before seen by the marketing industry.


Website Design in eCommerce

Website_Design_in_eCommerceeCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website.

Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website.

An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:

   1. Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.

   2. Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.

   3. The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.

Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread.

Significance of Electronic Business Card

Significance_of_Electronic_Business_CardThe dawn of the electronic Business Card is yet to come, however, it will happen and the business, company or independent professional that wants to thrive and bloom in the middle of this electronic birth has to keep up with the changing times.

With the more and more communication between strangers, it is necessary to create business card, excepting its paper format, now we can create business card in the computer and send it out with the emails. This are the some tips for creating your own business card. Read and find the information you need.

The increasing number of commercial transactions that are being carried out through the electronic media that the Internet represents are slowly but definitely changing the way we conduct our lives. Not only in a personal manner or the way we interact with those around us, but also in the way that we work and provide for our families and ourselves.

So much so, that in the past we used to have customised Christmas cards printed, we used to address them and write on them personal messages directed to those people that we love so much. Nowadays, people will log into a specific greeting card website and send hundreds of animated or still emails that will contain a link to an additional place where our Christmas card is located.

The same applies to our purchases; we can have products from across the world delivered to our doorstep in just a matter of weeks, and we can even pay for them in a matter of seconds without even having to leave our desk or chair. Communicating and contacting those that are dear to us once required dialling a phone number, walking to a house or writing and mailing a letter; now, all it takes is logging into a chat room or writing an email, and we can have an answer from that special someone just as quick.

If our personal life has changed that much, the way business is conducted by businesses in the world has to change too. As a result of this, even business cards have changed; most of the instant messaging programs such as the ones that you can use online, for example MSN, Yahoo and ICQ, have an option for the user to upload and create their own business card as an additional form of promotion.

Potential of Electronic Commerce

Potential_of_Electronic_CommerceElectronic Commerce is a marriage between a rapidly evolving technical environment and an increasingly pervasive set of ideas as to how markets should function. However, markets involve complex interaction between specific business/organizational factors, and general economic, social and political factors. The full economic potential of Electronic Commerce can only be evaluated against a backdrop of rapid change on all of these fronts. There are strong current indications that massive changes have already begun to occur across the entire business spectrum.

There are difficulties in assessing the commercial potential of the Internet. The Internet is the first multifunctional digital information environment that is available to a wide spectrum of users, ranging from large organizations to individuals, and it will likely become a focal point for the convergence of access media and the development of interactive services.

Although growth in the Internet is not the same phenomenon as growth in E-Commerce, ne vistas for Electronic Commerce are continually opening up on the Internet. In particular, the spectacular rates of increase in the numbers of households with Internet access has drawn special attention to prospects for direct sales to individual consumers. Companies are learning to identify the many new consumer communities that are emerging in the Internet environment, and to evaluate their product and service needs. Relatively mature communities have developed already around electronic services in the areas of travel and tourism, road navigation and health.

At this stage in the development of E-Commerce, a many of the aspects of inter-corporate and consumer E-Commerce applications must be evaluated separately in terms of their economic potential. However, developments like the Internet already bringing the consumer and corporate E-Commerce environments steadily together. The workplace (including schools & universities) is the most common source of computer awareness and skills that become transferred to the household.

Order to Examine E-Business in Islamic Perspective

Order_to_Examine_E-Business_in_Islamic_PerspectiveThe need for e-business study from Islamic perspectives has been disregarded by previous studies. In view of the studies, most of the studies interested to investigate e-banking acceptances, however the study of Islamic e-business is still limited. In Malaysia, the study of Islamic e-business is also scarce. Say for instance Guriting and Ndubisi, Sulaiman et al. Ramayah et al and Guru et al. have investigated e-business from banking point of view. Still, none of these studies tried to study Islamic e-business specifically. By itself, the study of Islamic e-business is remained inconclusive and provides motivation for the current study to provide a greater picture of Islamic e-business by conducting a research. E-business is a growing application that needs to be given a proper attention by Muslim businesses.

In this study, Islamic e-business is introduced. E-business is defined as the practice of performing and coordinating critical business processes through the extensive use of computer and communication technologies and computerized data.

Online Businesses Need Ways to Protect Intellectual Property

Online_Businesses_Need_Ways_to_Protect_Intellectual_PropertyOnline content distribution businesses require methods to protect the intellectual property of distributed content.Intellectual property protection is a mechanism to protect the rights of ownership of original work so that no one can use the rights-protected work in any way without seeking permission for the use and, if necessary, paying the rights owners a royalty for the use. Digital watermarking is the core technology in electronic rights protection. However, research addressing the concerns of businesses about intellectual property protection schemes through watermarking is scarce. In this paper, we address these concerns by first introducing watermark design patterns (WDPs) for electronic commerce applications, then presenting problems of copyright protection using watermarking, and finally presenting management concerns. A WDP is defined as the requirements of a digital watermark for a particular type of distributed media content under the protection of its intellectual property. This paper introduces four WDPs for four types of media data - video, image, audio, and text and they are denoted as WDPvideo, WDPimage, WDPaudio and WDPtext respectively.

Keeping Private Data Private During Online Shopping

online-shopping-imageA lot of people today are aware of the risks linked to the loss of personal data during the process of online shopping. It is important to know that what's private should be kept private. Some people might not know about it, but at the moment there is no legislation that would order the owners and sellers of various websites to keep the information of their visitors private when they shop or place an order of a certain product online.

As a result of the fact that currently there are no laws that could prevent the spread of private information, sellers have the right to gather users' private data such as full name, address, data regarding the websites users visit along with detailed information on the visited pages, the kind of goods and/or services users acquire, the concrete time of online visit, the address of the location users want their purchased product to be shipped, the type of shipping service they prefer to use, as well as information regarding their usual spending when shopping online.

Making an online purchase and leaving your private information today, means that sellers could consider using your data to sell it to alien companies or share it with affiliates. Thus, because of online shopping you could start getting more advertising email, telemarketing calls, as well as spam emails.

Privacy Policy

Users are mostly concerned about the problems of using their private information that is required before starting the online shopping activity. This is the reason why government regulators ask people who sell items online to state their privacy policies accurately and mention about the way users' private data will be used. In case you paid a visit to a website that does not clearly state these points, you might as well consider leaving the website, instead of placing an order.


Marketers is the Value of Online Marketing in Tough Economic Times

Online_Marketing_in_Tough_Economic_TimesI was contacted by a gentleman in the music industry who wanted advice regarding online marketing for his website. He seemed to have strong old-school marketing ties, but also knew that efforts surrounding social media and search engine optimization were important things to consider.

Should his company put most of its money into SEO efforts to gain search traffic? Or, is social media the place to spend? Should video production be a part of its budget? Does email marketing still matter? These are valid questions, and while the answer is different for every company, there are certain trends and best practices that can serve as a starting point for all ecommerce merchants.

Search Engine Marketing Still the Best

Most ecommerce companies know they should be investing in online marketing, but the big questions revolve around exactly where to spend time and money. I believe online marketing should almost always revolve around search engine optimization, especially for ecommerce sites. Both natural search results and paid results should, in most cases, be the cornerstone of an online marketing campaign. Not only is this a best practice, it is a tendency reflected in the real world. In an eMarketer.com survey last year, projected spending in 2009 on search by marketers topped the list.

Why is this the case? Search engines, by definition of their keyword-driven function, deliver focused, pre-screened leads both in the natural and paid results. The results are also, relative to other forms of marketing, easy to track and analyze. Search engines are also the go-to tool that consumers use in researching online purchases.

Consider These Alternative Avenues

However, a well-rounded online marketing effort goes beyond the search engines. As powerful of a traffic driver as it can be, SEO needs to be surrounded with other efforts. Here are some other avenues to keep in mind:

Social media and the corresponding digital word of mouth marketing it offers, can be extremely effective, especially for B2C companies.

Learn How to Sell on the Internet

Learn_How_to_Sell_on_the_InternetWhen you first get into online ecommerce business, it is imperative that you think ahead and be ahead of the curve. For this reason alone, you should start out by accepting credit card payments. The vast majority of people who might buy your products are likely to have a credit card. It is much more likely than them having a PayPal account.

I am certainly not saying that offering PayPal as a form of payment is a bad thing. But I read elsewhere that only about 1 in 10 people who own a credit card have a PayPal account. Even less use their PayPal account regularly. Therefore, you might be cutting your potential business by 90% just so that you can avoid paying for merchant services. You certainly do not want to cut your own throat before you ever get started.

Below are some tips for finding a good merchant services provider.

1: Know the kinds of fees you will be expected to pay

Merchant account fees can vary widely. One of the initial tactics some will use will be to encourage you to use their services with low upfront cost. Little do you know until you read the fine print that you are going to be charged a hefty percentage for each payment that is processed. When selling expensive products, they could be tapping into twenty or thirty dollars of your profits. Try to find one that has lower fees and not too expensive on their setup costs.

2: Check out the Customer Service

Before you ever sign anything or before they ever have the opportunity to charge you a dime, you should test out their customer service. You can simply do this by asking them a couple of questions about their services. Keep in mind that quickest is not always the best. A lot of companies online will now have automated systems setup to answer questions. This is not always the worst thing, but I have always felt more comfortable talking to someone directly.

You know that if it takes several days for them to get back to you that they will likely be the same way when you decide to use their service. People buying from a company they have never dealt with before are already going to be somewhat skeptical. If it takes a few days for you to get a response back from your merchant, and then another day or two to get back to your potential customers about something, this is detrimental to your business. You need them to be prompt and handle the questions professionally.


Learn Building ECommerce Site

Learn_Building_ECommerce_SiteWith the continued squeeze on the High Street and the online ecommerce spend continuing to grow, you cannot afford to be without a good ecommerce web site if you are in retail.

The question is where do you start with the bewildering range of ecommerce shopping carts and ecommerce solutions available? Whether you are looking for corporate website design and ecommerce, business to business ecommerce build and development, or more modest affordable e-commerce web site solutions, you still need to apply the ecommerce golden rules. A good web development company will be able to help with these questions and more. But first what do you need to know in order to set up a good ecommerce site?

The rules of successful ecommerce solutions

 1. Ensure visitors can find you

   2. Convert your visitors - give them what they want

   3. Retain your customers - make them into repeat visitors

   4. Integrate your ecommerce into your business

   5. Finally, find a good ecommerce consultant to put it all into practice

Ensure visitors can find you

It all revolves around marketing both online and offline. Market yourself ruthlessly. Put your URL on all your stationery and promote it at every opportunity when you have client contact. In addition, you need to make sure your website is fully optimised for search engines and you undertake a search engine promotion strategy. Search engine optimisation involves researching the key phrases that your customers use to find your services and including them appropriately throughout your site. It also means ensuring you do not use technology that impedes search engines when they are indexing your site. Once your site has been listed, you will do well for some phrases and poorly for more competitive ones. In order to improve your search listings you need to get links to your pages under the key phrases you wish to be found under. Again, you need to get a good consultant to organise the creation of link building strategy.


International Eelecrtonic Commerce

International_Eelecrtonic_CommerceFor many years now modern legal experts have been concerned with the phenomenon of globalisation of the economy. Accordingly, the globalisation of physical exchanges saw unprecedented growth during the 20th century owing to advances in transport, logistics and means of communication. That surely heralded the recent upheaval we have seen with automated information processing during the seventies, followed by computerised data exchange in the nineties, and finally, more recently, the digital networks such as the Internet which contribute to the globalisation of exchanges and communications. Whereas the first networks were closed and reserved for those involved in a particular business sector (banking, maritime transports, automobiles, mass distribution, …), with electronic transactions in an open environment, the legal issues are taking another turn, assuming other forms: the States do not intend to lose one iota of their sovereignty and a substantive law on electronic international trade is gradually being sketched out. However, the principles of free exchange and freedom of establishment are also to be found in the European internal market, based on freedom of movement (people, goods, services and capital), and in the context of the OECD and the WTO which promote free exchange and the prohibition of customs barriers or other quantitative restrictions to entering markets . Our modern societies are in the process of drawing up international rules for relationships which are being formed using new media, the digital networks. Accordingly, new methods of establishing standards that combine the legal, technical and security aspects are appearing.

Currently, within the information society it is noteworthy that electronic commerce hinges on two central themes connected with temporo-spatial considerations:

electronic communications transcend distance and time between people and goods and services, numerous people interact with their legal environment by moving around, with no fixed geographic location. However, aware of this phenomenon, the States tend to have an effect on these parameters by localising the liability of the people who supply electronic services in the information society and by regulating cross-border transmission of data which takes place in a relatively short space of time and therefore precludes any physical supervision

E-Commerce in the Context of the Foreign Exchange Market

E-Commerce_in_the_Context_of_the_Foreign_Exchange_MarketThe foreign exchange market is primarily an over-the-counter (OTC) market, ie one where contracts are agreed bilaterally between participants, rather than on-exchange. The market consists of different agents, trading for various reasons. ‘End-users’—such as corporates, investors and governments—may enter into foreign exchange trades with market intermediaries (usually banks) in order, for example, to facilitate the purchase of foreign currency bonds, or to exchange foreign currency proceeds from exports into their domestic currency. There is a large professional interbank market that enables intermediaries to manage the risks arising from this activity—at the simplest level, that exchange rate moves change the value, in domestic currency terms, of an asset denominated in foreign currency—by trading to transfer risk between themselves.

Participants in the foreign exchange (FX) market have been executing transactions across electronic messaging or broking systems such as Reuters and EBS, which match buyers and sellers, for many years. But these are proprietary, closed systems, and largely restricted to the interbank market. In contrast, the market between end-users and banks was for many years based on telephone contact. But in recent years internet-based trading platforms have appeared, and are being used by a much broader range of market participants.

There are two main types.

" First, ‘proprietary’ or ‘single-bank’ systems. Here a bank allows its customers to trade with it, on its own internet-based platform, essentially as an alternative to the telephone. There are advantages for both parties: time is saved in processing trades, especially small ones; the system can be linked electronically to each party’s in-house systems for recording, settling, accounting and risk-managing trades and therefore reduces the need for re-keying and aids straight through processing; and it simplifies complex cross-product transactions (eg some systems can automatically calculate the FX implications of a string of cross-currency securities trades). All these factors should reduce costs.

Business-to-Business E-Commerce

Business-to-Business_E-CommerceKen Jeanos, director of inside sales and operations with Panasonic Industrial, once believed the Internet would make his company more efficient. The company, a multibillion-dollar division of Matsushita Electric Industrial, distributes electronic components, storage devices and semiconductors, among other products, to original equipment manufacturers and electromechanical subcontractors. Panasonic Industrial had used electronic data interchange—a standard means of exchanging purchasing information—for more than 15 years, and it worked well for the company. Nevertheless, the Internet promised to streamline some business processes that weren’t EDI-enabled and to generally help the company meet customer needs more quickly, at a lower cost.

However, just as Jeanos’ expectations for the Internet were rising, a handful of Panasonic’s customers asked him to stop using EDI altogether and to use their extranets exclusively to exchange purchase orders, invoices and forecasts. Jeanos understood why. According to industry analysts and CIOs, shifting to extranets can allow a company to shut off its EDI networks, and save as much as several hundred thousand dollars a year on fees for value-added networks (VANs), the private network providers that lease communication lines for EDI, map data between trading partners and test systems.

But the move to extranets from EDI is not nearly as advantageous for Panasonic Industrial. In fact, extranets are eroding efficiencies Panasonic gained from EDI, because extranets create more manual work for Panasonic employees. "I have people spending all day on one customer, going to their website to confirm purchase orders and post advanced shipment notifications and invoices," Jeanos says, adding that if Panasonic’s customers continue to force him to use extranets, he will have to increase his headcount up to 10 percent in the area of customer service.

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