Legal Issues of Personalized eCommerce Applications

Most e-commerce applications require the collection and storing of information about customers. As a consequence, the performed transactions involve legal issues. For two years, the authors have been involved in a project, which studies the potentials of personalization of e-commerce systems from the particular angle of SMEs. The paper picks up a couple of scenarios that many e-commerce vendors face when implementing personalization on their Web sites. The specific focus of the discussion is the legal use of costumer profiles for e-commerce applications. Since most legal issues are difficult to understand for non-lawyers the paper makes use of a case study, which shows explicitly what ecommerce vendors need to keep in mind when implementing personalization on their Web sites

WWW visibility in marketing

Abstract. Social media is a vital channel for marketers nowadays. Customers are more empowered today than ever before and the Internet is accelerating the trend toward greater customer empowerment. In few years Web 2.0 has become a highly important media and it has changed the Web into platform where individuals can communicate, assemble and organize data. Web 2.0 also offers a variety of different “tools” for companies to be used in marketing. Because companies and products are visible and discussed in social media, it is recommendable that companies try to seek positive publicity in these media. Thesis aims to describe the opportunities social media provides in organizational use, as well as, to provide an overview of the current situation in social media utilization in Finland. Further, it seeks to investigate the challenges organizations have in social media or in a whole field of E-marketing, and what kind of plans organizations have for the future in a field of E-marketing. The study consists of theoretical and empirical parts. Literature part scrutinizes the literature that covers different sides of online marketing. Empirical part of the study was conducted as a survey research. Results are based on a questionnaire and interviews that were conducted among Finnish companies during time period of spring and autumn 2012. The data was gathered among companies operating in different fields of business. Interviews were transcribed and conclusions were made from those. Because of the limited number of participants that took part to the questionnaire, the results derived from it are merely suggestive. Nevertheless, interviews did strengthen the understanding that was inherited from the questionnaire. The findings reveal that e-marketing has a very important role in the companies’ marketing strategy. Majority of the firms see social media marketing as a positive thing. Yet, the companies were unsure whether they possess the needed skills to do marketing in social media effectively. The results imply that the reason for this is related to the skills and experience the companies have in social media marketing. Those are such issues though, that company will learn and will develop its own way to use social media. This was also showed in the results.Tiivistelmä. Sosiaalinen media on tärkeä markkinointikanava nykypäivänä. Kuluttajilla on nykyään enemmän mahdollisuuksia vaikuttaa kuin koskaan ennen, minkä lisäksi Internet tarjoaa yhä kasvavassa määrin vaikuttamiskeinoja. Muutamassa vuodessa Web 2.0:sta on tullut erittäin tärkeä media, joka on muuttanut Internetin alustaksi, jossa ihmiset voivat kommunikoida sekä koota ja järjestää tietoa. Web 2. tarjoaa useita ”työkaluja” myös yrityksille käytettäväksi markkinoinnissa. Koska yritykset ja tuotteet ovat näkyvissä ja keskustelun kohteena sosiaalisissa medioissa, on suositeltavaa, että yritykset yrittävät hakea positiivista julkisuutta näissä medioissa. Tämä pro gradu -tutkielma pyrkii kuvailemaan mahdollisuuksia, joita sosiaalinen media tarjoaa organisaatioille, minkä lisäksi se tarjoaa yleiskuvan sosiaalisen median hyödyntämisestä Suomessa. Lisäksi tavoitteena on selvittää haasteita, joita organisaatioilla on sosiaalisessa mediassa tai laajemmin sähköisessä kaupankäynnissä, sekä selvittää yritysten tulevaisuuden visioita sähköiselle kaupankäynnille. Tämä työ koostuu kirjallisuuteen perustuvasta teoriaosuudesta sekä empiirisestä osuudesta. Kirjallisuusosuus tarjoaa laajan katsauksen tieteelliseen kirjallisuuteen verkkomarkkinoinnin eri puolilta. Työn empiiristä osuutta varten järjestettiin survey-tutkimus. Tulokset perustuvat kyselytutkimukseen ja haastatteluihin, jotka suoritettiin suomalaisten yritysten piirissä kevään ja syksyn 2012 välisenä aikana. Data kerättiin yrityksiltä, jotka edustivat eri toimialoja. Haastattelut litteroitiin ja päätelmät tehtiin niistä. Koska kyselyyn osallistuneiden yritysten määrää jäi rajalliseksi, kyselystä saadut tulokset ovat lähinnä suuntaa antavia. Siitä huolimatta, suoritetut haastattelut vain vahvistivat kuvaa, joka saatiin kyselystä. Tuloksista ilmenee, että sähköinen markkinointi on tärkeä osa yritysten markkinointistrategiaa. Suurin osa yrityksistä näkee sosiaalisessa mediassa tapahtuvan markkinoinnin positiivisena asiana. Kuitenkin yritykset olivat epävarmoja siltä, osaavatko he tehdä tehokasta markkinointia sosiaalisessa mediassa. Tulokset näyttävät, että epävarmuuden syy löytyy yritysten rajallisesta osaamisesta ja kokemuksesta sosiaalisen median markkinoinnin alueella. Nämä ovat tietenkin asioita, jotka yritys oppii ajan kuluessa ja joissa se kokemuksen karttuessa löytää oman, itselleen sopivan tavan toimia. Tämä tuli näytetyksi myös tuloksissa

Mobile Application Design: Sale of Clothes Through Electronic Commerce

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, small clothing sales companies lost economic income and customers due to a lack of digital transformation, causing the dismissal of many employees. Due to this problem, our objective is to design an ecommerce mobile application for the sale of clothes, so that Small and medium-sized enterprises dedicated to this area generate income and retain their customers. For this, the Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodology was applied, because this methodology provides a structured way for companies or developers to visualize the development of the software, and for the validation by expert judgment, the survey and the questionnaire were used as instruments. Obtaining as a result a positive rating for the design of the mobile application and its acceptance to accommodate what is reflected. In conclusion, the e-commerce mobile application was successfully designed, backed by expert judgment, so that Small and medium-sized enterprises can offer their products and generate income, as well as build customer loyalty.

Configuration challenges for the “Made in Italy” Agri-food Industry

The paper presents the results of an exploratory investigation on the approaches to e-commerce strategies by firms in the agrifood sector, with a focus on Italian small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs). The article tries to assess the fit between online sales configurators (OSCs) that enable product customization and the habits of Italian online buyers. The study elaborates the empirical results of two data collection efforts: (i) the first effort is to collect data on the food configurators’ capabilities deployed by a sample of 105 active OSCs and (ii) the second effort is to collect data on the characteristics of the e-commerce websites from a sample of 522 Italian SMEs. Matching the results of the two analyses with existing literature on Italian customers' requirements while shopping for food online, the study provides insights on the opportunities offered by mass-customization delivered via OSCs to food SMEs, especially in terms of customer experience (CE) innovation

Integration of Knowledge Management in E-CRM: A Collaborative Study

The paper aims to present a collaborative study on Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) and Knowledge Management (KM) within four dimensions; technology, knowledge, customer and business based on Resource-based View Theory (RBV). With comprehensive knowledge about customer, SMEs organisations with web presence can provide more customised products and services to individual customers. Hence, the proposition of this paper is the success of e-CRM performance can be improved by interweaving knowledge management concept.    This approach is based on four models of CRM, eCRM and KM which are within four dimensions which are technology, knowledge, customer and business based on Resource-based View Theory (RBV).  The study identified that CRM Development Stages Model and Balance Scorecard Perspective of eCRM Model provides better fit to the four resource dimensions which in turn can develop a KM-based eCRM model. This paper concludes that eCRM system designed to support KM must be linked closely to the ideas that within the domain of eCRM which can be decentralized and contextualized.This research had only focused exclusively on conceptual and models of past researches; a comprehensive user study, extensive performance and scalability testing is left for future work.A key contribution of this paper is the four models of CRM, eCRM and KM which are analyzed with the four dimensions i.e. technology, knowledge, customer and business based on Resource-based View Theory (RBV) &nbsp