Website for online business

The popularity of the online marketplace shows no signs of slowing, so now may be the perfect time to start selling on the web. There are more options for creating an e-commerce site than ever before.

Businesses, particularly manufacturers, can offer lower and more affordable goods to consumers by selling products directly, eliminating distributors and retailers that add to the cost of the products.

If anyone thinking of selling online on their own website consider the following:
• The type and number of products they want to sell online.
• Whether selling online will make up a significant portion of the sales.
• Customer needs and preferences.

Studies found that businesses believe their website improved business effectiveness because more people were able to access information about the business. 

It is important for a business to have website features that add value and encourage return visits. The most basic use of the Internet is ‘retail marketing’ that is, providing information about goods and services. This can include information and descriptions about the goods and services, promotions as well as business contact information.

Information content can include a range of materials such as details related to the services offered, order status, corporate policies, and/or public relations. The availability of information on a website is of great importance and is critical for potential online customers. When customers are supplied with a more extensive set of information before purchasing from a website, they have a clearer idea of what they will receive in terms of products and services.
Website for online business

What is “doxxing”?

Doxxing is the word coined to describe the process of releasing of personally identifying information to the public without their consent.

This may include their real name, address, phone number, account names, passwords, even credit card details.

Doxxing is used to intimidate and frighten people by threatening their livehood and reputations - and at times their physical safety. Harassment and abuse, including rape and death threats are directed at the subject of the doxxing online at home and at work.

The effects of doxxing can be as seemingly mild as having of pizzas show up at a target’s house to as terrifying as having people show up outside their place of work, take photograph of them as they enter and leave their home, or attempt to engage or attack them.
What is “doxxing”?

Important internet privacy issues

In business and government, many important issues are being debated, as Internet technologies accelerate the ubiquity of global telecommunications connection in business and society.

Due to the web is increasingly important in people’s lives, one of the issues users raise is their desire to known that their privacy is being protected when they go online.

Use of the internet consists of the use of e-mail websites, social networking sites, organizational and institutional websites and browsing of other websites. Internet privacy refers to the control a person has over the information related to him or her and can be considered as part of computer privacy.

*Accessing individuals’ private E-mail conversations and computer records and collecting and sharing information about individuals gained from their visits to Internet websites and newsgroups (violation of privacy).

*Always knowing where a person is, especially as mobile and paging services become more closely associated with people rather than places (computer monitoring).

*Using customer information gained from many sources to market additional business services (computer matching).

*Collecting telephone numbers, E-mail address, credit numbers, and other personal information to build individual customer profiles (unauthorized personal files). In certain websites which provides online shopping facility users are asked to give their credit card details, passwords and PINs.

Privacy issues arise because very internet transaction leaves an important artifact of every transaction the individual did when searching for information, shopping or banking. This audit trail has caused many people to be concerned that this data may be inappropriately used.
Important internet privacy issues

E-Government

Electronic commerce has been defined broadly as the sharing of business information, maintaining of business relationships and conducting of business transactions by means of telecommunications networks.

This definition encompasses the activities of e-government as those of conducting the affairs of state on various levels and with the greatest rational involvement of citizenry.

Governments are embracing the internet to provide services to business (G2B) and citizens (C2C), as well as government to government (G2G), citizen to citizen (C2C), government to supplier (G2S) and government to employee (G2E). It is the use of information and communication technologies to support government function and services and to support citizens on their participation in political processes.

In year 2000 European Union Summit in Lisbon set ambitious goal of making Europe the world most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy. It resulted in the eEurope Action plan to exploit the full potential of the Internet to promote a competitive economy.

It means office automation and internal management information systems and expert systems, as well as client-facing web sites. The objective is to make it easier to deal with local, regional and national governments by making services available electronically.

The benefits of e-Government are reduced costs through more efficient processes, the integration of disparate agencies systems, and improved service to citizens via the internet and other electronic channels. Efficiency in administration and providing broad access to information and transactional services to the citizenry are recognized as the primary concerns in the e-government.

Investment by government will also decrease the cost of doing business through simplification of procedures self-service systems and one stop shop for enterprises. The biggest beneficiaries here will be the small to medium enterprises, which are the backbone of the European economy.
E-Government

Information overload

Information has become the great leveler of society and business. Information is the raw material of group decision making and problem solving.

Today, practically everyone is more informed than ever even the most informed person was a mere 25 years ago yet, paradoxically knows a smaller percentage of the available knowledge.

The researchers noted that information overload is not a new phenomenon. Many studies suggested that information overload became a serious problem towards the end of the 19th century with arrival of the telegraph, the expansion of transportation networks and the rapid growth in the volume of paper documentation.

As advances in information technology and communication supply us with information at an ever accelerating rate, the limitations of our brains became all the more obvious.

Boundaries are defined no longer by technology but our own technology.

There was a time when people only had to cope with telephone ringing in the office and e-mail delivery once a day.

Now the people have e-mail, faxes, Blackberries, PDAs, cell phones, Instant Messaging, pagers and a continuous stream of mail from many postal and delivery services.

Information overload occurs when the rate of information flow into a system and/or the complexity of that information exceed the system’s processing capacity.

Information overload

Managing Information: Accessible Filing

The reason why computers are sure to take over in more and more areas of organizational life is that they can make any information already collected for one purpose instantly available, to be used for many other secondary purposes. This has opened up totally new ways of using information.

The information requirements of structured decision making can be more precisely predicted and defined. The information itself is often quantitative and can be used within a strictly defined and rule-bound system. Decisions are likely to be relatively automatic, routine, frequent and short term.

In the supermarket, for example, there may be 30 checkout operators and 10 000 or more different lines stocked. At peak times, purchases may be leaving the supermarket at a rate of 40 000 items per hour.

Stocks of each line must be reordered to arrive at the rate of consumption or changing demand for particular lines caused by promotional; activities or food scarce could be easily lead to empty shelves to throw away ‘till roll’ data collected for the primary purpose of calculating how much to charge the customer.

Systems that covert data from internal or external sources into information to be used by mangers are called management information systems.

Information is expensive to collect, but once held in digital form it costs next to nothing to store and so can be freely used over and over again for a variety of secondary purpose. For instance, till roll data collected over a period of months or years can be analyzed for long term trends and presented graphically to aid in forecasting and strategic planning.

Indexing of information is always a reliable source for forecasting, as the management to interpolate the trends of the underlying behaviors of the figures.

Wal-Mart’s key strength in use of information to manage supplier relations, while Tesco and other UK supermarkets maintain full control over the stocking of shelves in their store based on their internal expertise in logistics information.

They use their data on stock levels to maintain and enhance what is on the shelves, but stocking decision remain in their control.

Managing Information: Accessible Filing

Enterprise Information Portals

Enterprise information portals are growing trend in the design and deployment of intranets in business.

Enterprise in highly competitive environment must cope with mountainous information. At the same time, they must act quickly to make timely business decision.

An enterprise information portal (EIP) is a web based interface and integration of intranets and other technologies that give all intranet users and selected extranet users access to a variety of internal and external business applications and services.

For example, internal applications might include access to e-mail, project websites, and discussion groups; human resources Web self-services, customer, inventory, and other corporate database; decision support systems, and knowledge management systems.

Enterprise information portals can be defined as an applications that enable companies to unlock internally and externally stores information and provide users a single gateway to personalized information need to make informed business decisions.

Enterprise information portal have been developed to provides an effective platform for knowledge workers in organizations to find, manage, use and share previous disparate information.

The volume of data and information available in an organization in growing exponentially resulting in information overload. Not all of the information is relevant to users.

The business benefits of enterprise information portals include providing more specific and selective information to business users, providing easy access to key corporate intranet website resources, delivering industry and business news, and providing better access to company data for selected customers, suppliers, or business partners.

Enterprise information portals are design for work processes, activities, and user communities to improve the access, workflow and sharing of content within and across the organization.

However, in order to present something as simple as a Web page with links to useful internal an external information sources, applications and services, an enterprise information portal must integrate many information technologies. So fully fledged corporate portals are proving to be a challenge to build.  
Enterprise Information Portals

Marketing Information System

For many firms, the competitive nature of today’s business environment has brought home the realization that strategic advantage will accrue to the firm doing the best marketing job.

Effective marketing requires information. Every firm must organize the flow of marketing information to its marketing managers. Companies are studying their manager’s information needs and designing marketing information systems (MIS) to meet these needs.

A marketing information system (MIS) is a system which is used to collect, analyze, report, and take action on information which is critically important to the marketing function of any organization.

To carry out their analysis, planning, implementations and control responsibilities marketing managers need information about development in the marketing environment.

It is useful only if it can help a marketing manager to make a decision. In order to be useful, information should be of high quality, relevant, timely and complete. It should provide a good picture of reality and it should thus to be accurate, valid and reliable.

The role of the MIS is to assess the manager’s information needs, develop the needed information, and distribute the information in a timely fashion to the marketing managers.

The Marketing Information System operates as a decision support system to the following four systems:
*The internal accounting system
*The marketing intelligence system
*The marketing research systems
*The analytical marketing system

The needed information is developed through internal company records, marketing intelligence activities, marketing research and marketing decision support analysis.

The information will includes data on economic and business trends, consumer buying behavior, market development, competitive products and prices as well as data generated by market research.
Marketing Information System