ECommerce Technology eCommerce Technology Overview

1
E-Commerce Technologye-Commerce Technology
Overview

2
Commerce (8000 B.C.)
BUYER LOCATES SELLER
SELECTION OF GOODS
NEGOTIATION
SALE
PAYMENT
DELIVERY
POST-SALE ACTIVITY
INFORMATION
PHYSICAL
3
Electronic Commerce (2002)
SOME TECHNOLOGIES USED
SOME INFORMATION GATHERED
SEARCH ENGINE
SEARCH BEHAVIOR
BUYER LOCATES SELLER
ON-LINE CATALOG
BROWSING BEHAVIOR
RECOMMENDER AGENT
CUSTOMER PREFERENCES
CONFIGURATOR
SELECTION OF GOODS
EFFECTIVENESS OF PROMOTIONS
SHOPPING BOT
BARGAINING STRATEGIES
AGGREGATOR
PRICE SENSITIVITIES
INTERNET
NEGOTIATION
AUTOMATED AGENTS
PERSONAL DATA
TRANSACTION PROCESSOR
SALE
MARKET BASKET
DATA INTERCHANGE
CREDIT/PAYMENT INFORMATION
PAYMENT
CRYPTOGRAPHY
DELIVERY REQUIREMENTS
E-PAYMENT SYSTEMS
DELIVERY
TRACKING AGENT
ON-LINE PROBLEM REPORTS
ON-LINE HELP
POST-SALE ACTIVITY
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
INFORMATION
BROWSER SHARING
FOLLOW-ON SALES OPPORTUNITIES
PHYSICAL
INTERNET TELEPHONY
4
The Electronic Marketplace
BUYER LOCATES SELLER
DIRECT SELL
SELECTION OF GOODS
CREDIT FILE
BID PREP
NEGOTIATION
SALE
ORDER TRACKING
SECURE PAYMENT
PAYMENT
DELIVERY
DELIVERY
DATA ANALYSIS
POST-SALE ACTIVITY
CRM
INSTALL
5
The eCommerce Process

• Buyers and sellers find each other
• Communication (via Networking, the Internet, and
  Web-Based Information Architectures)
• Human-Computer Interaction, Multimedia
• Intermediaries
• Negotiation

6
The eCommerce Process

• Transaction
• Transaction processing, Databases
• Electronic Payment Systems,
• Computer Security,
• eCommerce Architecture
• Order fulfillment
• Manufacture (manufacturing systems)
• Delivery (tracking systems)
• Supply Chain Management

7
The eCommerce Process

• Post-sale events
• Customer Service and Help Facilities
• Reorder, restock
• Accounting
• Transaction processing
• Interoperability between online and legacy
  systems
• Data analysis
• Data Mining

8
eCommerce Technology

• Infrastructure Electronic payments
• Wireless technologies Content delivery
• Search engines Intelligent agents
• Access security Data mining
• Data interchange Mass personalization
• Security

9
E-Commerce Infrastructure

• What worldwide structure is required to support
  e-Commerce?
• Network
• Machines
• Protocols
• Security
• Payment

10
The Internet

• The fundamental technology linking business and
  people around the world in less than 1 second
• Nothing competes with it
• How does it work?
• How big is it?
• Who owns it? Who governs it?
• How does it grow? How big can it get?
• What architecture allows this?
• What are the limitations?

11
Internet Infrastructure
Mercy College Internet Server
It is a global collection of networks, both big
and small. These networks connect together in
many different ways to form the single entity
that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very
name comes from this idea of interconnected
networks.
12
Large ISP, UUNET
Most large communications companies have their
own dedicated backbones connecting between
various regions. In each region, the company
has a Point of Presence (POP). The POP is a
place for local users to access the company's
network, often through a local phone number or
dedicated line
13
What are Fiber Optics

• Fiber optics (optical fibers) are long, thin
  strands of very pure glass about the diameter of
  a human hair. They are arranged in bundles called
  optical cables and used to transmit light signals
  over long distances.

It has following parts

• core - thin glass center of the fiber where the
  light travels
• cladding - outer optical material surrounding the
  core that reflects the light back into the core
• buffer coating - plastic coating that protects
  the fiber from damage and moisture

14
Client/Server Architecture

• Fundamental Internet structure
• Client requests service server provides it
• Data exchanged only through real-time messages
• Server may become a client to a different server

15
Network Topologies

• More than two computers causes complications
• Each machine on a network must have a unique
  address
• If machine 2 sends a message to machine 4, what
  tells 1, 3 and 5 to ignore it, but 4 to listen?
• Ethernet protocol

1
2
4
5
3
LAN LOCAL AREA NETWORK
LAN BUS TOPOLOGY
16
Routing
Machine 2.16
Machine 1.35 wants to send a packet to Machine
3.249. Routers determine the path the packet
will take.
Machine 3.249
B
A
Machine 1.35
Router A can send the packet either way
4.1
5.9
NETWORK 4 ITS ROUTER
NUMBER OF ROUTES
ROUTING STATISTICS
17
Routers
NORTEL
3COM
CISCO
18
Web Server Basics
19
Internet Server

• The server is the heart of the technical
  architecture, receiving requests from Internet
  users, retrieving the information locally or from
  networked devices and replying.
• Selection and sizing of this machine is critical
  task, typically presenting a tradeoff between
  performance and cost.

20
Web Server
Web server - A Web server is a piece of computer
software that can respond to a browser's request
for a page, and deliver the page to the Web
browser through the Internet. You can think of
a Web server as an apartment complex, with each
apartment housing someone's Web page. In order
to store your page in the complex, you need to
pay rent on the space. Pages that live in this
complex can be displayed to and viewed by anyone
all over the world. Your landlord is called
your host, and your rent is usually called your
hosting charge. Every day, there are millions
of Web servers delivering pages to the browsers
of tens of millions of people through the network
we call the Internet.
21
Server Workflow
22

• http//www.site.com/index.htm

Protocol
Domain Name
Web Page
Verisign.com How can you get the URL that you
want?
23
Lets Display

• http//www.site.com
• /index.htm
• /dir1/dir2/index.htm (Directory structure)
• /cgi-win/maillist.exe (Evoking a mail list
  perform a function and than put the result on the
  web)

24
UNIX v.s. Windows

• The two basic options are
• UNIX based platforms(IBM, Sun, HP)
• Microsoft NT based, Intel platforms
• MS products generally cost less than UNIX
  platforms.
• UNIX is a more mature OS than Windows based
  servers. As a result it delivers a better
  performance for the same hardware configuration.
• UNIX administration, requires more complex
  skills.
• If you dont have in-house UNIX expertise,
  investing in an UNIX based server may require a
  large maintenance cost.

25
Client / Server

• In general, all of the machines on the Internet
  can be categorized
• as two types
• Server
• Clients
• Those machines that provide services (like Web
  servers or FTP servers) to other machines are
  servers.
• And the machines that are used to connect to
  those services are clients.
• When you connect to Yahoo at www.yahoo.com to
  read a page, Yahoo is providing a machine
  (probably a cluster of very large machines), for
  use on the Internet, to service your request.
  Yahoo is providing a server.
• Your machine, on the other hand, is probably
  providing no services to anyone else on the
  Internet. Therefore it is a user machine, also
  known as a client.
• It is possible and common for a machine to be
  both a server and a client, but for our purposes
  here you can think of most machines as one or the
  other

26
Domain Name Servers

• If you spend any time on the Internet sending
  email or browsing the web, then you use Domain
  Name Servers without even realizing it.
• Domain Name Servers, or DNS, are an incredibly
  important but completely hidden part of the
  Internet, and they are fascinating!
• The DNS system forms one of the largest and most
  active distributed databases on the planet, and
  without DNS the Internet would shut down very
  quickly.

27
The Basic Idea

• When you use the web or send an email message,
  you use a domain name to do it. For example, the
  following URL
• http//www.mercy.edu
• Contains the domain name mercy.edu. So does this
  email address
• Bozdogan_at_mercy.edu
• Human-readable names like mercy.edu are easy for
  human beings to remember, but they don't do
  machines any good. All of the machines use names
  called IP Addresses to refer to one another. For
  example, the machine that humans refer to as
  www.mercy
• .edu has an IP address of 216.27.61.137. Every
  time you use a domain name, you use the
  Internet's domain name servers (DNS) to translate
  the human-readable domain name into the
  machine-readable IP address.
• During a day of browsing and emailing, you might
  access the domain name servers hundreds of times!

28
The Internet

• Protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP)
• Addressing schemes
• Domain names, Domain Name servers
• URLs
• Browsers
• Programming
• HTML,Perl, Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• Java,
• Web architecture
• What web systems look like

29
Web Architecture
How are web sites constructed?
TIER 1
TIER 2 Server
TIER 3 Applications
TIER 4 Database
SOURCE INTERSHOP
30
Firewall

• The firewall is typically a hardware/software
  combination that controls the traffic between
  your internal network and the public internet.
• Although a firewall can be directly incorporated
  into an Internet server, it is most commonly a
  specialized computer.
• The configuration is a challenging task and
  should be performed by experts.

31
Firewall
As you can see all inbound and outbound Internet
traffic must pass through the firewall
32
Would you leave your companies front door
unlocked at night? 

• Obviously not, so why leave doors to your network
  open? If your network is connected to the
  Internet a firewall is an absolute must. Some of
  the reasons companies do not currently have a
  firewall in place 
• They feel the threat of an attack to their
  system(s) is low
• They think that a firewall is difficult to set up
  and maintain
• They think that the implementation of a firewall
  solution would be a significant investment
• They are un-informed about the many ways their
  system(s) can be compromised and the amount of
  freely available tools the average person can use
  to do so

33
Would you leave your companies front door
unlocked at night? 

• There are many firewall solutions available today
  ranging in price from under 1000 to tens of
  thousands of dollars. Typically a firewall is
  either a standalone device or a software package
  that usually requires a dedicated machine or
  server to run on.  

34
eCommerce Data Exchange Needs
Catalogs
Quotations
RFPs
Purchase Orders
Letters of Credit
Ship Notices
Electronic Payments
Invoices
35
Data Interchange

• How can sites exchange information without prior
  agreement?
• What do the data fields mean? price, extended
  price, unit price, prix, ????, t?µ?, ?, XAC12
• XML Extensible Markup Language

36
Invoice Example
ltUnitPricegt6.05lt/UnitPricegt
SOURCE PROF. JEROME YEN
37
Data Exchange Problem
Different systems and applications use
different names and formats for the same
information
SOURCE FTISOFT
38
How to Make Data Portable

• Tell what the data means
• Tell how the data is structured
• Tell how it should look
• BUT DO THESE SEPARATELY. MIXING IS BAD
• The meaning -- XML
• The structure -- DTD (document type definition)
• The formatting -- XSL (Extensible style sheet)
• Example XML catalog structure

SO COMPUTERS CAN UNDERSTAND IT
39
XML at a glance
Well Formed Document ltBookgt ltAuthorgtGeorge
Soroslt/Authorgt ltTitlegtThe Crisis of Global
Capitalismlt/Titlegt ltYeargt1998lt/Yeargt
ltPublgtPublic Affairslt/Publgt
ltPricegt26.00lt/Pricegt ltISBNgt1-891620-27-4lt/ISB
Ngt lt/Bookgt
DTD Document Type Definition lt?xml
version"1.0"gt lt!DOCTYPE Book lt!ELEMENT Book
(Author, Title, Year, Publ, Price, ISBN)gt gt
SOURCE PROF. JEROME YEN
40
XML Recipe Example

• lt?xml version"1.0"?gtltRecipegt ltNamegtApple
  Pielt/Namegt ltIngredientsgt ltIngredientgt ltQty
  unitpintgt1lt/Qtygt ltItemgtmilklt/Itemgt lt/Ingredi
  entgt ltIngredientgt ltQty uniteachgt10lt/Qtygt
  ltItemgtappleslt/Itemgt lt/Ingredientgt lt/Ingredients
  gt ltInstructionsgt ltStepgtPeel the
  appleslt/Stepgt ltStepgtPour the milk into a
  10-inch saucepanlt/Stepgt lt!-- And so on...
  --gt lt/Instructionsgtlt/Recipegt

41
Electronic Payment Systems

42
Electronic Payments

• Forms of money
• token (cash), notational (bank account), hybrid
  (check)
• Money does not move on the Internet
• Credit-card transactions
• Secure protocols SSL, SET
• Automated clearing and settlement systems
• Smart cards
• Electronic cash, digital wallets
• Micropayments
• Electronic delivery of goods
• Electronic bill presentment and payment
• BlueGill

43
Multimedia

• How can multimedia be represented and
  transmitted?
• Text, graphics, speech, music, video, movies,
  virtual reality
• What are the limitations?
• Speed, resolution, fidelity, color
• How are multimedia created?
• How are they stored?
• File formats GIF, TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, ...
• How are they displayed (put in web pages)?
• How are they indexed?

44
Intelligent Agents

• Programs to perform tasks on your behalf
• Metasearchers, shopping bots, news agents, stock
  agents, auction bots, bank bots
• How to make agents intelligent
• Rule-based systems
• Knowledge representation
• Agents that learn
• Inductive inference
• Negotiation agents
• Avatars (characters in human form)

SYLVIE from VPERSON
45
Shopping Agents
46
Data Mining

• Extracting previously unknown relationships from
  large datasets
• Discovery of patterns
• Predicting the future
• past behavior best predictor of future purchasing
• Market basket analysis
• diapers/beer

47
Data Mining Tools

• Visualization (seeing the data) Table Lens
• Predictive Modeling
• Database Segmentation
• Classify the users
• Link Analysis
• Associations discovery
• Deviation Detection
• Are any of the data unusual? Fraud detection

48
Data Mining

• Extracting previously unknown relationships from
  large datasets
• discover trends, relationships, dependencies
• make predictions
• target customers
• In eCommerce, data comes from
• customers themselves
• cookies
• external databases
• data matching
• DoubleClick, etc.
• Digital rights management tools (what we read and
  how much)
• library records

49
Mass Personalization

50
Outline

• What is personalization?
• Personalization is based on data
• How can data about people be acquired?
• From people themselves
• From their clickstream
• From outside data sources
• How can data be used
• To improve the customers experience?
• To help the company?

51
Mass Personalization

• Treating each user as an individual
• key is INFORMATION
• How to acquire and store information about
  customers
• Cookies
• Question and response
• Clickstream analysis
• External databases.
• How to use information effectively and instantly

52
What is Personalization?

• Addressing customers by name and remembering
  their preferences
• Showing customers specific content based on who
  they are and their past behavior
• Empowering the customer. Examples Lands End,
  llbean
• Product tailoring. Example dell.com
• Connecting to a human being when necessary.
  CallMe
• Adeptra TeleBanner
• Allowing visitors to customize a site for their
  specific purposes
• Users are 20-25 more likely to return to a site
  that they tailored (Jupiter Communications, Inc.)

53
Need For Personalization

• In the real-world
• Customer relationship is mediated by people
• Personalization is critical PEOPLE are PEOPLE
• On the Web
• Too many customers too few employees
• Orders are entered by machine follow-up is by
  machine
• Customer relationship is mediated by machines
• Personalization is critical
• Uniqueness (everyone is different)
• Efficiency (everyone has limited time)

54
Store Visitors in the Real World

• Customer
• buys something
• pays cash
• uses a credit card
• uses a store charge card

DATA COLLECTED ONLY IF VISITOR BUYS SOMETHING
55
Click Behavior
CASUAL VISITOR
STORE HOME PAGE
OFFICEPRODUCTS
SPORTING GOODS
HOUSEWARES
PRESENTATION ITEMS
HUNTING
GOLF
KITCHEN
LASER POINTERS
CLUBS
RIFLES
TOASTERS
LASER 1
LASER 2
LASER 3
CALLAWAY
56
Click Behavior
PROSPECTING VISITOR
STORE HOME PAGE
OFFICEPRODUCTS
SPORTING GOODS
HOUSEWARES
PRESENTATION ITEMS
HUNTING
GOLF
KITCHEN
LASER POINTERS
CLUBS
RIFLES
TOASTERS
LASER 1
LASER 2
LASER 3
CALLAWAY