E-COMMERCE: A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE FOOD SUPPLY/DEMAND CHAIN

The use of electronic commerce for quality control and cost cutting efficiencies by the food and agricultural industries in the United States is the focus of this paper. The food industry engages in e-commerce through 1.) Internet shopping for consumers called business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce 2.) Business-to-business (B2B) Internet market discovery exchanges used by food suppliers at any point in the supply chain, and 3.) Business-to-business (B2B) relationships that reduce costs and increase efficiencies in the procurement, storage and delivery of food to retail stores or distribution centers. This third use of e-commerce is the most highly developed and widely adopted. It allows retailers to share information about consumers' purchases and preferences with food manufacturers and farmers and for tracking food products' characteristics, source, and movement from production to consumer. This circle of information allows high quality and consistent products to be consumed at lower prices. This paper is about the development of e-commerce in the food industry, the economic concepts and goals that it meets, and the changes it brings to the industry. E-commerce both fosters and demands vertical coordination. It favors consolidation of firms. It changes the business culture from one of adversarial relationships to one of cooperation and trust. It changes the historical supply chain into a supply/demand loop while it lowers the cost of food. Policy issues arise around monopoly power, privacy, a diminution of variety, and the demise of small, undercapitalized firms.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

Examination of Infomediary Roles in B2C E-Commerce

This article provides a parsimonious research model that assists in the study of infomediary roles in B2C E-Commerce, their level of integration and sophistication, and their impact on infomediary performance and customers’ satisfaction. After an extensive literature review, discovery, facilitation, and support roles were identified as the main roles that infomediaries perform in the B2C e-commerce arena. Based on a sample of 150 infomediaries from three industries namely automobile, retail, and travel, four hypotheses related to the research model were tested. Results suggest that infomediaries with high integration and sophistication level are found in the retail industry. In addition, not all infomediary roles exhibit the same level of integration and sophistication across the three selected industries

A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed

Some specific Austrian insights on markets and the "new economy"

In section 1 of this contribution, we will recall the usual arguments which are put forward to analyze the New Economy (NE) as the empirical realization of the Competitive Economic Equilibrium (CEE) model. After having stressed the limits of these arguments, we will try to show that some Austrian concepts and developments better fit to explain the economic impact of Information Technologies on present markets. This purpose is characterized in section 2 of this contribution. Finally, in section 3, we will refer to some concrete examples taken from the reality of electronic markets, in order to emphasize how these concepts and developments allow a better understanding of the working of markets in the NE, even if they exhibit some limitation.Austrian legacy, subjectivism, New Economy, economic analysis

Transformation theory and e-commerce adoption

This thesis investigates business transformation on the Internet; particularly the nature and significance of Cyber transformation theory and the Marketspace Model as a framework for E-commerce adoption. E-commerce can raise a firm\u27s productivity, transform customer relationships and open up new markets. The extent to which nations become adopters of E-commerce is set to become a source of comparative national competitive advantage (or disadvantage) in the twenty first century

Quality Dimensions for B2C E-Commerce

Organizations have still not realized the full potential of e-commerce. One factor that is likely to influence the further adoption of e-commerce is the quality of the e-commerce system as system quality impacts user satisfaction and hence use of the system. However, in order to improve the quality of any systems, one first needs to identify measures to assess quality. Although other researchers have recognized the need for such measures, they have primarily focused on a single specific aspect of e-commerce systems, typically the user interface. In this paper we identify the key components of e-commerce systems and synthesize existing research related to quality of these components to arrive at a comprehensive list of quality dimensions, which in turn provide measures to assess the quality of e-commerce systems

The Influence of Culture on iTrust Aspects in B2C E-Business

This research suggests an online interpersonal trust (iTrust) to better understand the buyer cognitive and affective reactions towards online purchasing. To complete this main goal, this study provides proposition on the effect of culture (Individualistic and collectivistic) on online interpersonal trust (cognitive and affect-based trust) related to web design and buyer behavior aspects towards purchase intention in B2C e-business website. It is important to compare online shopping perceptions between two different groups because the Individualistic buyers‟ satisfaction may be completely ineffective in producing a desired response in the Collectivistic

B2C quality evaluation factors from Jordanian consumer perspective

The consumer of B2C business plays a significant role in sustaining B2C business companies. However, many companies neglect to incorporate consumers need in their websites developments, resulting unachieved business objectives.Companies must identify consumers’ factors in their websites developments so that the B2C websites receive higher hits. This study aims to investigate and identify the B2C quality factors from the consumers’ perspective, to rank these factors according to their importance, and to categorize these factors into meaningful groups.Methodology from three phases has been conducted to achieve the objectives.These phases include identification, ranking, and categorization of factors. Data was gathered from the literature and analyzed using SPSS. Simple descriptive statistics such as mean and frequency were used to rank the quality factors. In addition, factor analysis was used to categorize the quality factors. Seventeen quality factors were found to be important from the consumers’ perspective. The seventeen quality factors were further categorized into three groups: E-usage, E-information, and E- services. These categories will be used to construct quality evaluation framework in the next stage of the study