Development of an intelligent e-commerce assurance model to promote trust in online shopping environment

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) markets provide benefits for both buyers and sellers; however, because of cyber security risks consumers are reluctant to transact online. Trust in e-commerce is paramount for adoption. Trust as a subject for research has been a term considered in depth by numerous researchers in various fields of study, including psychology and information technology. Various models have been developed in e-commerce to alleviate consumer fears, thus promoting trust in online environments. Third-party web seals and online scanning tools are some of the existing models used in e-commerce environments, but they have some deficiencies, e.g. failure to incorporate compliance, which need to be addressed. This research proposes an e-commerce assurance model for safe online shopping. The machine learning model is called the Page ranking analytical hierarchy process (PRAHP). PRAHP builds complementary strengths of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and Page ranking (PR) techniques to evaluate the trustworthiness of web attributes. The attributes that are assessed are Adaptive legislation, Adaptive International Organisation for Standardisation Standards, Availability, Policy and Advanced Security login. The attributes were selected based on the literature reviewed from accredited journals and some of the reputable e-commerce websites. PRAHP’s paradigms were evaluated extensively through detailed experiments on business-to-business, business-to-consumer, cloud-based and general e-commerce websites. The results of the assessments were validated by customer inputs regarding the website. The reliability and robustness of PRAHP was tested by varying the damping factor and the inbound links. In all the experiments, the results revealed that the model provides reliable results to guide customers in making informed purchasing decisions. The research also reveals hidden e-commerce topics that have not received attention, which generates knowledge and opens research questions for future researchers. These ultimately made significant contributions in e-commerce assurance, in areas such as security and compliance through the fusing of AHP and PR, integrated into a decision table for alleviating trustworthiness anxiety in various e-commerce transacting partners, e-commerce platforms and markets.College of Engineering, Science and TechnologyD. Phil. Information System

Consumers and Augmented Reality in Shopping and Services: Drivers and Consequences

This dissertation investigated the effect of augmented reality on user experience and also the mediation effect of user experience in the relationship between augmented reality and the outcome variables including user satisfaction and user’s willingness to buy/user’s willingness to use augmented reality. Three studies were conducted in three different contexts, including buying consumer products, entertainment services and vehicle service use. The results indicate that augmented reality significantly and positively influence user experience, and user experience fully mediates the impact of augmented reality on user satisfaction and user’s willingness to buy/ user’s willingness to use augmented reality. Further, the results showed that trade-off between price and value, user’s information privacy control, perceived control and responsiveness moderate the effect of augmented reality on user experience. In addition, a new scale was developed to capture and measure the output quality in terms of image recognition generated by augmented reality. Additionally, a new aspect of user experience exclusively driven by augmented reality was developed and added to the current user experience scale

Developing the overall marketing strategy for Small Portuguese Hotels in the Spanish market

This study’s purpose was to develop a successful marketing strategy for Small Portuguese Hotels (SPH) in the Spanish market and provide the start-up with recommendations on both tactical and operational level. Various theoretical models have been applied that when used all together, substantiated by an extensive literature framework, fulfil the process of developing a marketing strategy in a successful way which is needed to succeed as a company nowadays. The concluded marketing strategy for SPH has been based on all data gathered throughout the entire study, consisting of both desk and field research. In terms of field research, an online survey was conducted among Spaniards as part of the customer analysis. Besides, an interview has been held with Mrs. Rita Alves Machado as part of the internal analysis and several SPH employees have participated in several questionnaires needed to design the most relevant framework for SPH when qualifying different strategic options to eventually find the best fitting marketing strategy: ‘Before targeting the promising Spanish market, SPH should achieve its short-term goals and improve day-to-day business. Besides, before moving to the Spanish market, SPH needs a complete and clear marketing, sales and social media plan that can straight be implemented and will strongly position SPH in the Spanish market to expand its existing Portuguese customer base.’ The complete and clear marketing, sales and social media plan comprise the recommendations on both tactical and operational level.Este estudo focou-se no desenvolvimento de uma estratégia de marketing sustentável para a Small Portuguese Hotels (SPH) no mercado espanhol e direcionar a start-up tanto a nível estratégico como operacional. Foram aplicados vários modelos teóricos que, utilizados em conjunto, e fundamentados por uma extensa revisão de literatura, completam o desenvolvimento de uma estratégia de marketing bem-sucedida, necessária para o sucesso de qualquer empresa atualmente. A estratégia resultante foi fundamentada pelos dados recolhidos ao longo de todo o estudo, consistindo em pesquisa documental e trabalho de campo. Em termos da pesquisa realizada em trabalho de campo, foi realizado um questionário online a pessoas de nacionalidade espanhola como análise do cliente. Adicionalmente, foi realizada uma entrevista com a Rita Alves Machado no âmbito da análise interna e com todos os colaboradores da SPH, que participaram em vários questionários, necessários para delinear o quadro mais relevante para a empresa no apuramento de diferentes opções estratégicas e, eventualmente, encontrar a melhor estratégia de marketing pretendida: "Antes de se focar no promissor mercado espanhol, a SPH deve alcançar os seus objetivos de curto prazo e de gestão do dia-a-dia. Adicionalmente, antes de entrar no mercado espanhol, a SPH necessita de um plano completo e claro de marketing, vendas e redes sociais que possa ser implementado eficazmente, que posicionará fortemente a SPH no mercado espanhol para expandir a sua base de clientes portugueses existente." O plano integral de marketing, vendas e redes sociais compreende as recomendações tanto a nível estratégico como operacional

The Impact of Information and Communication Technology on the Tourism Sector

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the global businesses environment by a wide range of tools, methodologies and functions, facilitating the strategic management and supporting firms to achieve a long term competitive advantage. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the new applications of Information Communication Technology in tourism industry, the contribution of ICT to the promotion of the tourist product, as well as the potential to the tourism management and the process of decision-making. One important tool, which helps in making decisions in the field of tourism economy, is the Geographic Information System (GIS), which provides a comprehensible representation of the statistical figures of the tourism economy by facilitating decision-making on tourism policy. In this paper is presented some tourist financial figures and their visualization through graphs by Geographic Information System

The Influences Of Atmospheric Cues On Consumer Behavioral Intentions: An Affordance Perspective

Online social shopping emerges from the idea of using social networking features to benefit traditional e-commerce activities. Technology-driven shopping environments not only support shopping task completion and self-entertainment, more importantly, these new shopping environments become alternate outlets for consumers to interact with others. This dissertation aims to understand the effects of atmospheric cues on consumers\u27 behavioral intentions in online social shopping environments. This dissertation study proposes and validates a research model that predicts consumers\u27 diverse behavioral intentions (approach and avoidance) toward using online shopping environments due to website atmospheric cues. This research model is constructed based on theoretical perspectives including stimulus-organism-response framework, the technology acceptance model, the theory of affordances, and activity theory. The empirical study used a three-factorial between-subject field experiment approach to validate the research model and hypotheses. A total of 360 valid responses were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each of the subjects was randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions. Data was analyzed using three-way MANOVA and PLS-SEM techniques. Analysis results largely supported the research model. Three path coefficients surprisingly had different signs from their correlation coefficients, and further mediation analysis indicated that: perceived usefulness fully mediated the effects of perceived utilitarian affordances, perceived sociability of use fully mediated the effects of perceived social affordances, and that perceived usefulness and perceived fun fully mediated the effects of perceived sociability of use on behavioral intentions. This dissertation theoretically contributes to online social shopping research by building a well-grounded research model that integrates several theories from different disciplines. The instrument for measuring perceived affordances provides an operationalized solution to understand interaction mechanism between technology-driven environments and users. Practically, investigating the effects of atmospheric cues and decomposing process-based and outcome-based evaluations suggest different aspects that online merchants can work on to improve consumer experiences

Adoption and Non-Adoption: Profiling Internet Usage among Tourists to New Zealand

Since the explosion of the internet as a business medium, one of its primary uses has been marketing. The advantages of using the internet for business-to-consumer transactions are clear. The openness of the internet is creating opportunities for virtually all companies across various industries. The words 'internet', 'World Wide Web', 'www' or the 'web' refer to the same thing and are used interchangeably within this research study. The tourism industry is also experiencing a rapid adoption of the internet technology for marketing travel products and services. As a destination New Zealand is a small country comprising two main land masses and smaller outlying islands, with a population of about 4 million people (Statistics New Zealand 2004). Tourism is promoted as an essential part of the national economy, particularly to earn foreign exchange and generate employment. The number of international tourists visiting New Zealand is 2.2 million (Tourism New Zealand, 2006). In New Zealand almost all regional tourism organizations (RTOs) have a web presence, thereby exposing potential tourists to an array of destinations to visit. However, there are few New Zealand based studies that profile tourists based on their internet adoption and the differences between internet users and non-users. The question that baffles every business manager is what predisposes consumers to use a website? This is the fundamental question that motivated the study. While usability does play a major role in the adoption and use of a particular website, it is outside the scope of this project, otherwise the scope would have been too large and complicated to permit a useable questionnaire given the other concerns about respondents' past experiences and attitudes toward use of the net for the specific purposes of holiday purchases. The study draws upon innovation diffusion theory (IDT) and more recent conceptualizations of IT adoption behaviour to examine differences among Rogers' (1995) adoption categories. Within this context, 'adoption' refers to the stage in which a technology is selected for use by an individual. 'Diffusion' refers to the stage in which the technology spreads to general use and application. For this study an attempt is made to create a behavioural profile of visitors based on a sample of 517 overseas visitors to New Zealand. Visitors were asked to complete a questionnaire and provide information on their demographics, travel related behaviour, internet usage patterns, perceptions of the internet and online shopping in general. The thesis thus describes the initiation and evolution of an empirical research project, which investigates the adoption and diffusion of internet technologies amongst international visitors to New Zealand. The study was launched in an attempt to: 1) learn more about internet usage by visitors to New Zealand; 2) create a psychographic profile of visitors; 3) attempt to empirically validate the technology acceptance model (TAM); and 4) fill a noticeable void so that future researchers on IT and internet adoption by tourists in New Zealand have a foundation and starting point. Most of the previous research related to TAM has been in workplace related situations while studies in tourism have used students as subjects, rather than actual visitors to a particular destination (Shang et al., 2005, Moon and Kim, 2001, Klopping and McKinney, 2004). Specific market studies undertaken by destination marketing organisations or regional tourism organisations were considered only inasmuch as they aided generalization as place specificity hindered conceptual development pertaining to themes of adoption and general usage patterns. The study seeks to build on Rogers' (1995) seminal work on the diffusion of innovations and make a unique contribution to existing diffusion studies by its focus on the individual visitors as the unit of analysis and by its test of the TAM model. This study presents descriptive results via standard statistical analysis, a cluster analysis of users and a structural equation modelling of the TAM applied within a context of international visitors to New Zealand. The data were collected at major locations - the viaduct basin in Auckland and the international departure lounge at the Christchurch International Airport. The two locations were chosen to enable faster data collection. Initially the data was gathered at the viaduct basin in Auckland but the number of respondents was not many. Since the data collection was slow, decided to collect from Christchurch International airport where departing passengers could be approached. Individual passengers/tourists were approached and a screening question to ascertain if they were visitors or not was asked. If they were visiting, then they were asked to participate in the survey. No prior specific screening was undertaken to determine if they had used internet or not for their trip/travel to New Zealand. However, subsequent analysis shows that only 2.3% of the sample had not used the internet, and 31% of the sample had not bought tourism products or services over the internet. Therefore, overall, experience and internet usage was not uncommon for the majority of the sample, but a large proportion of non-users existed to permit comparative analysis. While there is a bias towards males in the sample, the 19-35 years age group was slightly more numerous for both genders, than were other age groups. The results indicate that mean internet usage is comparatively high, as is familiarity with many electronic consumer durables. The sample possesses a bias toward English speaking countries, younger people and educationally higher qualified people. Internet search engines seem to be the most popular source of search. The socio-demographic variables such as age, gender and educational attainment appeared to be but a moderate influence on general internet usage and thus on the use of the internet for booking holidays. Factor analysis of the attitudinal statements revealed six factors, which accounted for about 60 % of the total variance. The clear emergence of factors enabled the development of clusters. The clusters appear to have significance with reference to usage rates of internet. The home ownership of electronics shows a high percentage of respondents had mobile phones. This implies that New Zealand Tourism has to look at options or possible services it can introduce to market to these people who could be using mobile devices not only in their country but also while travelling in New Zealand. Wireless is another important development in the field of technology and many of the tourism DMO in other developed countries in Europe and US are adapting approaches based on these technologies to market to potential customers

Virtual Access: A New Framework for Disability and Human Flourishing in an Online World

While many commentators have noted the wealth and class disparities that emerge from the digital divide, disability adds another important lens through which to consider questions of access and equity. Online accessibility for disabled people has fallen prey to the same assumptions and impediments that led to the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) addressing disability access in the offline world. Addressing these shortcomings requires a significant conceptual shift in our understanding of “access,” even among disabled people. Offline, the sidewalk or doorway hindered access to those who needed assistance walking or moving. Today’s virtual sidewalks and doorways complicate access in fundamentally different but no less important ways.This Article reframes the legal, normative, and theoretical dimensions of the intersection of disability and online access to suggest a more granular approach than those provided by existing judicial and scholarly interventions. Our approach includes three recommendations. First, we suggest greater attention to online analogues for offline legal categories that create different zones for human interaction: public forums, public accommodations, non-public spaces, and what one of us has termed “private public forums”—the privately owned venues that functionally replace the public forum, especially online. Second, contrary to the approach adopted in some jurisdictions, we propose eliminating any requirement of a physical nexus between an online site and an in-person operation. Third, we recommend directing most regulatory requirements toward three kinds of commercial entities whose power, influence, and design functionality best position them to remedy existing gaps in online disability access, which we call design services, communication platforms and online mediators. Design services provide browsers, operating systems, and website design tools and templates. Communication platforms connect individual users through social media and other sharing mechanisms. Online mediators aggregate information to connect customers with product and service providers. If these three kinds of companies can set design norms for individual websites and apps, much of the framework for disability access will be in place. But as we will explain, not all individual users can or should be forced to incur compliance costs related to website and application design—some small sites are properly exempted from such oversight. For this reason, we suggest that design services make disability access the baseline; that communication platforms and online mediators implement accessibility once they reach certain size or revenue thresholds; and that certain users be permitted to opt out of disability access features

Online Search And Society: Could Your Best Friend Be Your Worst Enemy?

Online search is becoming the main source individuals use to find information about sports, politics, health, religion, world issues, and other subjects that shape our views on the world and how we live our lives. Of all internet users, 92% use online search and are doing so on desktop and mobile, with an average of 129 searches a month per person. Search is designed to keep users engaged and serviced with speed and brevity. As search engine usage increases around the world and impact on behaviours becomes more of a concern, we must understand how might the design of search engine algorithms be affecting society’s ability to shape the way we see the world. Is commerce compromising community in user experience and design? Are we unknowingly being sent into echo chambers with predictive and personalized search algorithms. Is the fast and wide internet actually narrowing the doors of perception we have been walking through online for the last 30 years? It is the right time for through exploratory research to better understand the current and potential future impacts and implications of search on society and citizens. I will employ a literature review, first party participant research and document a chronology of knowledge discovery and capture in context to searching, sharing and storing of information, along with a horizon scanning exercise with a focus on trends research. The first-party human-based research will involve the segmentation of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants to explore whether there are patterns emerging within distinct age groups. These methods will be deployed and findings will be analyzed to ascertain what the issues might be and whether people understand the complexities, powers, and abilities of search engines