Consumer Behavior, Organizational Development, and Electronic Commerce - Advances in Electronic Commerce
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This article has investigated the insurance industry and provided insights into the relationships of organizational size and age with outsourcing and organizational structure. Also, this study investigated the relationship between Web site age, outsourcing, and organizational structure. The main findings are that firm size and maturity is related to the decision of Web-based development approach and the best organizational structure to support online activity. The insights obtained by a new variable: Web site age suggests that insurance companies are trying to develop their Web-based activities within their existing organizational structures, rather than creating new e-commerce divisions.

This chapter develops a new model of web IS success that takes into account both intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors. The proposed model begins with the Garrity and Sanders model of technologic acceptance and develops an extended nomological network of success factors that draws on motivation and flow theory.

Recommendation systems are special personalization tools that help users to find interesting information and services in complex online shops. Even though today’s e-commerce environments have drastically evolved and now incorporate techniques from other domains and application areas such as Web mining, semantics, artificial intelligence, user modeling, and profiling setting up a successful recommendation system is not a trivial or straightforward task. This chapter argues that by monitoring, analyzing, and understanding the behavior of customers, their demographics, opinions, preferences, and history, as well as taking into consideration the specific e-shop ontology and by applying Web mining techniques, the effectiveness of produced recommendations can be significantly improved. In this way, the e-shop may upgrade users’ interaction, increase its usability, convert users to buyers, retain current customers, and establish long-term and loyal one-to-one relationships.

Recently, new standards for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce transactions, to reduce extended record locking, relaxed standard database transaction properties. In this chapter, we provide a parallel methodology employing a mobile/intelligent agent framework to alleviate extended record locking, while adhering to standard database transaction properties. Our methodology provides a minimum 30% reduction of record locking compared to new B2B standards.

A Web site that wants to increase its number of visitors can pay for search engine ads or attempt to improve its natural search engine ranking. Nobody really knows, which, if either, of these methods provides a positive return on investment. A search engine optimization (SEO) project was undertaken at a new e-commerce site. The site’s search engine rankings and traffic were measured after each phase in the project. The results indicate that SEO is an effective method for improving search engine rankings and site traffic. In addition, the costs and benefits of the SEO project are compared with a pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing campaign. The SEO project proved more cost effective than the PPC campaign.

It has long been known that small businesses have realised enhanced profits through the adoption of ecommerce. However, a number of recent studies have suggested that it is the larger businesses that are reaping the rewards of e-commerce rather than the smaller businesses. This slow growth of e-commerce adoption in SMEs has been attributed to various adoption barriers that are faced by small business owners/managers. These barriers have been well documented in numerous research studies. However, the relationship between these barriers has not been fully examined, particularly in developing countries. Of particular concern is the fact that the conclusions concerning the nature and role of barriers to e-commerce adoption have simply been transferred from studies in developed economies to those in developing ones. 96 non-adopting SMEs in Indonesia are compared to 129 in Sweden to determine whether the perception of importance of barriers differs between the two locations. The data is also analysed to determine whether the underlying factors of these barriers differs across the two locations.

This study surveys the perceptions and experiences of Australian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the implementation of Internet-based Electronic Commerce (EC) as seen from the perspective of the extent of deployment. With a sample of 115 small businesses in Australia, this article uses regression modelling to explore and establish the factors that are related to the extent of deployment in EC. A multiple regression analysis shows that seven factors: perceived relative advantage, trialability, observability, variety of information sources, communication amount, competitive pressure, and nontrading institutional influences, significantly influence the extent of EC deployment by SMEs in Australia. The managerial implications are discussed.