Electronic Commerce

Product or company names used in this set are for identifi cation purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of research on open source software : technological, economic and social perspectives / Kirk St.Amant and Brian Still, editors.

Nowadays, access to reliable information has become an essential factor leading to success in business. In this regard, adequate security of information and systems that process it is critical to the operation of all organizations. Therefore organizations must understand and improve the current status of their information security in order to ensure business continuity and increase rate of return on investments. Since, information security has a very important role in supporting the activities of the organization and for this reason; it is needed to have a standard or benchmark which controls governance over information security. Hence, this paper discusses some of Information Security Management System (ISMS) standards in order to determine their strengths and challenges. Then, based on most appropriate standards in the field, a method is proposed to allow information technology-related or based enterprises to implement their ISMS. This method helps identifying critical assets and related threats and vulnerabilities, assessing assets risks and providing necessary risk treatment plans. The proposed method makes it possible and structured to establish information security management system in IT related large-scale enterprises.

This paper presents the design philosophy and initial design decisions of Herald: a highly scalable global event notification system that is being designed and built at Microsoft Research. Herald is a distributed system designed to transparently scale in all respects, including numbers of subscribers and publishers, numbers of event subscription points, and event delivery rates. Event delivery can occur within a single machine, within a local network or Intranet, and throughout the Internet. Herald tries to take into account the lessons learned from the successes of both the Internet and the Web. Most notably, Herald is being designed, like the Internet, to operate correctly in the presence of numerous broken and disconnected components. The Herald service will be constructed as a set of protocols governing a federation of machines within cooperating but mutually suspicious domains of trust. Like the Web, Herald will try to avoid, to the extent possible, the maintenance of globally consistent state and will make failures part of the clientvisible interface.

In recent years, online auction systems such as eBay have been more and more popular. The client-server architecture is usually adopted for the basic architecture of online auction systems. However, the client/server architecture usually causes the problems of bandwidth bottleneck and insufficient storage spaces. Therefore, we propose to replace the client/server architecture of traditional online auction systems to P2P architecture

Electronic Commerce is one of the most significant fields in internet appli- cations. With the focus moving from B2C-commerce to B2B-commerce, in- tegrating internet and legacy systems within one company and getting technologies used in different companies to work together is a pretentious task. After discussing the current research in software architecture, includ- ing suitable notations for describing them, the

Negotiation, an important facet of business, is an iterative and complex process. Depending on the nature of business and the type of transaction, negotiation criteria, duration and complexity vary widely. An intelligent software agent can help the consumers and enterprises in business negotiation. It can negotiate with humans or with other software agents to arrive at mutually agreeable terms and

In 2006, 100,000 servers were broken down just within 10 minutes . Those were the victims of some Denial-of-Service attacks. This news and knowing that some of those victims were so well-known companies like Hotmail and Amazon, indicate the significance of this kind of threats and attacks. "In a DoS attack, a malicious client (called the attacker) performs operations designed to partially or completely prevent legitimate clients from gaining service form a server (called the victim)" . DoS attacks can be categorized in two main classes: logic attacks and flooding attacks. In flooding attacks, which are discussed in this paper, the resources of the victim server are consumed by sending a big number of requests to it in order to make it unable to provide appropriate services to legitimate clients.

The importance of e-business services quality continues to increase, as the use of e-commerce to support business activities becomes a routine practice for many enterprises. Companies need robust, predictable and efficient services that they can rely upon. This paper explores ways of how e-business quality can be established, monitored, reported and managed. A review of the literature considers the work recently undertaken in both business-level quality of service (QoS) and the QoS issues at the infrastructure level, as well as the relationship between these two areas. From a practical research perspective, the work within the framework of the EU-funded LAURA project is presented. The key goal of this project is to facilitate interregional zones of adaptive electronic commerce using the potential of the ebXML architecture. A Dynamic QoS Management framework is proposed to inform the implementation of QoS and SLA concepts within the LAURA project.

Despite the rapid growth of Electronic Commerce in recent years few studies have been published which assess the efficacy of current commercial web sites. This paper aims to provide a detailed and original Web Assessment Index, which focuses on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content. The suggested methodology is equally valuable for analyzing commercial, educational and non-profitmaking organizations. The scoring mechanism is explained and the index is applied to assess the web sites of the largest firms in Spain. Finally, a series of implications of this study are presented.

Business to Business (B2B) relationships in Ecommerce are becoming increasingly important. However, there is little guidance available for managers about how relationships should be formulated or managed. Further, requirements analysis for information technology support of B2B interorganisational relationships (IORs) depends on the business model of the relationship, and needs a predictive basis. This paper describes a method for planning and managing IORs based on Williamson's transaction cost theory, to guide managers when negotiating B2B alliances, and procurement of IT support for them. This method covers market analysis, relationship planning, transaction cost estimation and IT requirements analysis. Lessons learned in presenting the method to managers and using it in case studies are reviewed.

Online purchasing is a decision-making process that involves inherent uncertainty. Yet consumer tolerance for uncertainty differs across cultures, requiring e-vendors to decide whether to adapt websites to different cultures when operating globally. We examine the effect of Hofstede's cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance (UA) on consumer perceptions of e-loyalty. Viewing information quality, trust, and system quality as uncertainty reduction mechanisms, UA is hypothesized to moderate relationships involving these constructs in a recognized model of IS success. Specifically, we posit that relationships involving these constructs will be stronger for consumers from high UA cultures. Using data drawn from over 3,500 actual consumers from 38 different countries, and controlling for the impact of other cultural dimensions, results suggest that UA moderates the effects of information quality on perceived usefulness, and of trust on e-loyalty, but not system quality relationships. We discuss practical implications of our research, in regard to designing websites intended for global use.

In many scenarios, users must be able to demonstrate the (time) existence, integrity and validity of data including signed data for long or undetermined period of time. This document specifies XML syntax and processing rules for creating evidence for long-term nonrepudiation of existence of data. ERS-XML incorporates alternative syntax and processing rules to ASN.1 ERS syntax by using XML language.

An electronic voting system makes it possible for the voters to cast their ballots over the computer network. Hence, voters 11 can participate in elections without having to go to the polling places, which is more convenient and efficient. To design a 12 practical voting scheme, Mu and Varadharajan have recently proposed an anonymous secure electronic voting scheme to be 13 applied over the network. It does not only protect voters' privacy and prevent double voting, but also suits large-scale elections. 14 However, the scheme has a weakness in security; that is, some voters may still double vote without being detected and may 15 even reveal information they should not. In this paper, we shall show this weakness and improve the scheme to increase the 16 protection against fraudulence. 17 D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 18 19 23

Purpose -E-commerce is diffusing into developing countries (DCs), and is assumed to help deliver the international development agenda. But how can the connection between e-commerce and socio-economic development be conceptualised? The aim of this paper is to analyse that connection by drawing from the development studies discipline to take a broader perspective on e-commerce than that so far provided by firm-level research. Design/methodology/approach -The authors adopt a literature survey approach, drawing their conceptual foundations from development studies, and supplementing this from the e-commerce literature. Findings -The paper develops a new, integrated model that explains the way in which e-commerce can contribute to socio-economic development.

Eine Vielzahl von Händlern aus Drittländern (insbesondere aus der V. R. China) bieten Waren auf E-Commerce-Plattformen (wie insbesondere Amazon und eBay) in Deutschland zum Verkauf an. Es kommt in diesem Zusammenhang zu Abgabenhinterziehungen großen Ausmaßes mit der Nebenfolge von Wettbewerbsverzerrungen zu Lasten rechtstreuer Händler.

Die legislativen Prozesse sind angelaufen und haben z. T. schon zu Ergebnissen geführt. Berücksichtigt ist der Beschluss der EU-Finanzminister vom 05.12.2017, der Beschluss der Finanzministerkonferenz (Finanzminister der Bundesländer) vom 30.11.2017 und die aktuelle Gesetzgebung in Großbritannien. Die Diskussion legislativer Maßnahmen steht im Zentrum dieses Werkes. Die Zielrichtung der Maßnahmen sollte sein, Voraussetzungen zur Verbesserung der Kontrolle zu schaffen und andererseits die Compliance zu erleichtern. In Bezug auf die Verbesserung der Kontrolle und der Erleichterung der Compliance gibt es nach dem Stand der Planung erhebliche Defizite.

Zudem wendet sich das Buch aber auch an Overseas-Händler. Overseas-Händler müssen sich auf legislative Maßnahmen und geschäftspolitische Entscheidungen von Plattform-Betreibern rechtzeitig vorbereiten, denn eine umsatzsteuerliche Non-Compliance wird in Zukunft auch für Overseas-Händler risikoreich und kann u. a. zur Blockierung ihrer geschäftlichen Aktivitäten führen. Es werden die jüngsten Maßnahmen von Amazon diskutiert und in den Kontext gestellt. Es wird die Konfliktsituation von Händlern erläutert, einerseits ihren steuerlichen Pflichten in kurzer Frist genügen zu müssen und andererseits daran wegen der Schwerfälligkeit des Finanzamtes Neukölln gehindert sind.

Das Werk wurde auch gegenüber der 2. Auflage nochmals deutlich überarbeitet.

https://tredition.de/autoren/joerg-brettschneider-22479/steueroase-e-commerce-und-ihre-austrocknung-paperback-101172/

https://www.daserste.de/information/wirtschaft-boerse/plusminus/sendung/swr/onlinehandel-steuertricks-china-100.html

Preis: 35,99 EUR in Paperback

Rechtsanwalt Dr. Jörg Brettschneider
[email protected]

Public-key cryptography is widely used as the underlying mechanism for securing many protocols and applications in the Internet. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is required to securely deliver public-keys to widely-distributed users or systems. The public key is usually made public by means of a digital document called certificate. Certificates are valid during a certain period of time; however, there are circumstances under which the validity of a certificate must be terminated sooner than assigned and thus, the certificate needs to be revoked. The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is one of the most used protocols for retrieving certificate status information from the PKI. However, the OCSP protocol requires online signatures, which is a costly operation. In this article, we present an improvement over OCSP based on hash chains that reduces the processing burden in the server which in turn provides an additional protection against attacks based on flooding of queries.

Based on a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews of seven automobile dealerships in the City of Oulu, Finland, we uncovered four themes-strategic understanding of electronic commerce, technological understanding of electronic commerce, maturity of the website supporting electronic commerce, and electronic commerce developmental strategy-which allowed to make sense in a succinct way of the similarities and differences among seven automobile dealerships. Locating the seven dealerships on these four themes (dimensions) yielded quite consistent patterns, and led us to identify adopter categories of electronic commerce. We suggest three major adopter categories: " procrastinators," " followers," and " visionaries." " Followers" are divided further into " opportunists," " waverers," and " striders." The analysis of the histories of websites also showed that the existence of a website as such and its operational use are not sufficient to trigger effective learning about electronic commerce. We suggest that the learning at the levels of strategic and technological understanding of electronic commerce are joint outcomes of electronic commerce developmental strategy and the website maturity rather than either of them separately. The interviews also showed that the dealers with higher strategic and technological understanding tended to have a more active electronic commerce developmental strategy and more mature websites. This led us to conjecture that the developmental strategy and the website maturity are influenced by both strategic and technological understanding.

Despite the claims on how stakeholders could benefit from electronic marketplaces (eMarketplaces), the actual user take-up of eMarketplaces have been modest and in many cases even failed to deliver their promises. We believe this is due to the lack of preparations in dealing with values of such ventures during the strategic planning of the organisations concerned. Given that values are

In the past 20 years a variety of electronic markets have been setup for the allocation of capacities in road transportation. A lthough, inefficiencies and cost pressures are high, the electronic markets have not succeeded so far. In this paper we will give an overview of the so-called electronic transportation exchanges and analyze the factors that were involved in the repeated failures. By using a multi-layer framework which integrates established research approaches for interorganizational systems (IOS) we argue that the failures provide valuable insights for the configuration of electronic commmerce systems in general and in particular for the transportation exchanges that are currently emerging on the Internet.

The evolution of information and communications technology, together with the increasing use of electronic commerce, phones and mobile applications, have facilitated mobile payments to become an alternative payment method for buyers and vendors. Mobile payments offer various opportunities to business environment and became a starting point in the transition from electronic to mobile. This paper aims to analyze the present situation of the mobile payment methods and to identify the effects that mobile payment systems have on electronic commerce.

America by reducing inventory levels, expediting express shipments, and fostering the rapid growth of new e-commerce enterprises. In Brazil, the trend is to concentrate ecommerce on large firms, with a long tradition in retail operations. The nonexistence of high-standard distribution services is restraining the entrance of smaller firms in the process. We examine in the paper the possible utilization of excess hold capacity in inter-city bus lines as a logistics basis to express shipments in Brazil. The challenge is to establish an effective logistics network linking bus firms in order to achieve the required standards.

Speed, around-the-clock availability, and security are the most common indicators of quality of service on the Internet. Management faces a twofold challenge. One the one hand, it has to meet customer expectations in terms of quality of service. On the other hand, companies have to keep IT costs under control to stay competitive. Therefore, capacity, reliability, availability, scalability, and security are key issues to Web service managers. Electronic business sites are complex computer-system architectures, with multiple interconnected layers composed of many software and hardware components, such as networks, caching proxies, routers, load balancers, high speed links, and mainframes with large databases. The nature of electronic business workload is also complex due to its transactional nature, security and authentication requirements, payment protocols, and the unpredictable characteristics of service requests over the Internet. Planning the capacity of electronic business services requires more than just adding extra hardware. It requires more than intuition, ad-hoc procedures, or rules of thumb. Many possible alternative architectures can be used to implement a Web service; one has to be able to determine the most cost-effective architecture and system. This is where the quantitative approach and capacity planning techniques come into play. Capacity planning techniques offer much more than just performance prediction. In these times of ubiquitous Internet services and businesses, capacity planning should be actually viewed as a powerful management technique. Performance problems on the Internet are exacerbated by the unpredictable nature of service requesting and information retrieval over the Web. It is not uncommon for Web sites to experience, without warning, a manifold increase in traffic volume. This type of load spike, also known as "flash crowds," creates terrible performance problems and slow page download times. Web delays frustate customers and cost over four billion dollars each year to online businesses according to an Intelliquest report (www.intelliquest.com/press/). The causes of delays are various. Overloaded networks and servers are the most common ones. The viability of electronic business depends on the ability of the IT infrastructure to offer timely and reliable services. For companies, whose business depends on the behavior of their online services, long waiting times and unavailability can be disastrous. Electronic businesses must continuously guarantee quality of service to avoid losing sales and customers. Security, performance, and availability are key issues for any service on the Web. This article introduces capacity planning as an essential tool for managing quality of service on the Web and presents a methodology, where the main steps are: understanding the environment, characterizing the workload, modeling the workload, validating and calibrating the models, predicting the performance, analyzing the costperformance plans, and suggesting actions.

Abstract.Increased Internet traffic and the sophistication of companies,in tracking that traffic have made,privacy a critical issue in electronic commerce (e-commerce). This has spawned,a number of research works ,addressing Internet privacy from the perspectives ,of three ,main ,stakeholders --

T he Web has transformed electronic information systems from single, isolated nodes into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. In this context, companies have equipped themselves with high-capacity storage systems that contain data in several formats. The problems faced by these companies often emerge because the storage systems lack structural and application homogeneity in addition to a common ontology. The semantic differences generated by a lack of consistent ontology can lead to conflicts that range from simple name contradictions (when companies use different names to indicate the same data concept) to structural incompatibilities (when companies use different models to represent the same information types).

Due to the recent evolution of telecommunications infrastructure and the Internet as a commodity market for bandwidth, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) encounter new issues concerned with bandwidth management for the network interconnection. Bandwidth commodity exchange is considered a new B2B (Business-to-Business) electronic commerce application that brings new market opportunities to carriers and service providers for managing their bandwidth resources. This paper develops market-based bandwidth management optimization models for Differentiated Service (DiffServ) QoS (Quality of Service) networks using an implementation of the bandwidth management agent, BMP (Bandwidth Management Point). We use network economic models to formulate an optimization problem for the interconnection and resource allocation policy of the DiffServ network. We formulate and develop those economic models as optimization problems of LP, NLP, MILP and mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), and discuss the pricing mechanisms and available solution approaches for the implementation of the BMP's resource optimization process. Different opportunity costs are estimated based on the results of a network simulation using traffic flow statistics measured from a recent Internet backbone. We then numerically simulate the behavior of backbone network ISPs to optimize their profits for various demand scenarios.

Most recommender systems present recommended products in lists to the user. By doing so, much information is lost about the mutual similarity between recommended products. We propose a graphical shopping interface, which represents the mutual similarities of the recommended products in a two dimensional space, where similar products are located close to each other and dissimilar products far apart. The graphical shopping interface can be used to navigate through the complete product space in a number of steps. We show a prototype application of the system to MP3-players.

This paper presents a model conceptual framework that is aimed at promoting trust in the online retailing environment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Despite rapid Internet growth, the development of online retailing in Saudi Arabia continues to progress very slowly compared to that of the developed and leading developing countries. To determine the reason behind the sluggish growth of online retailing in the KSA, a mixed methods study involving retailers and customers was conducted in four stages. The outcomes of the study point to distrust in the online retailing environment in Saudi Arabia as a key inhibitory factor for growth. As such, a five-part model is proposed to promote trust in the online shopping environment in the KSA.

Despite the rapid growth of Electronic Commerce in recent years few studies have been published which assess the efficacy of current commercial web sites. This paper aims to provide a detailed and original Web Assessment Index, which focuses on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content. The suggested methodology is equally valuable for analyzing commercial, educational and non-profitmaking organizations. The scoring mechanism is explained and the index is applied to assess the web sites of the largest firms in Spain. Finally, a series of implications of this study are presented.

Today, research in electronic negotiations focuses on negotiation protocols that support the negotiation of only a few properties. These protocols are mainly designed for automated negotiations between software agents. However, for peer-to-peer negotiations in business-to-business electronic marketplaces, such protocols are less appropriate. For example, negotiations about multiple attributes, complex attribute combinations, or frame contracts require more sophisticated support of the involved interactions and communication acts. In this paper we present a novel approach to the eective support of electronic negotiations among human negotiators. Our approach is based on the following observation. The outcome of a successful negotiation process is a business contract. The contract evolves during the negotiation, coordinated through the exchange of structured messages such as oers, requests, quotations, counteroers, and acceptances. Therefore, each negotiation between business partners involves the exchanges of documents and messages. Furthermore, documents and messages are interrelated in that a message leads to a new contract version which itself is the medium for a new negotiation step and thus initiates a new message. In contrast to the current practice of separate management of messages and documents, we create a powerful framework for eective negotiation support in electronic marketplaces by combining communication and document management. Our approach enables monitoring of contractual obligations and traceability of both documents and messages and their interrelations. Ó

Functionality of electronic commerce enabling technologies is dependent upon pervasive networks that a large number of applications share. Given the scarcity of network resources, it is imperative to allocate existing resources based on the actual needs of its users. In this paper, we study a two sided matching algorithm that enables such an allocation using tools from matching literature. Network system deploys intelligent agents that negotiate terms of allocation assignments with other intelligent agents that represent the users. We report the time complexity of the algorithm and give an example on how the mechanism performs.

The implementation of technology and, in particular, eCommerce technologies has had unforeseen consequences for the relationship between managers and employees. To be able to operate in an increasingly global and competitive environment, retail banks have had to develop new ways of dealing with their employees. Issues have arisen that have necessitated a rethink in the way employees interact with customers and this, in turn, has required changes to human resource strategies. The question we address in this paper is what are the employee capabilities and qualities retail banks must develop to satisfy both more sophisticated customers (who demand flexibility of interactions, responsiveness and convenience) as well as the organisation's own needs (including expanded sales opportunities, cost containment or reduction and customer loyalty) when implementing eCommerce technologies. The paper discusses two case studies illustrating some of the issues with which banks, as service organisations, have had to deal. These two banks have taken rather different approaches in their use of technology to interact with their customers and this has implications for the way they manage their employees who deal with those customers.

This research investigates eBay auction features that influence auction outcomes: likelihood of transaction or whether the item was actually sold in the auction (auction success) and value of the last bid (auction effectiveness). Specifically, we study several seller options available to the seller to increase the final price and successful end to the auction. We investigate the effectiveness of the term "New In Box" in the auction's heading, the use of an actual or cut picture, the initial price set by the seller, use of a reserve price and acceptance of a credit card in increasing the likelihood of the auction ending successfully, and at increasing the final price. Along with other independent variables, the impact of factors dealing with the auction pictures is examined. Hundreds of auctions (423) for two financial calculators were examined in this study. Findings show that utilization of certain risk-reducing auction features positively influence outcomes of these ...

This article deals with the protection of consumers when they enter e-commerce transactions with foreign companies. Most states reacted to the growing importance of e-commerce by enacting data protection and consumer protection legislation and by requiring registration of e-businesses. Companies have found a way to circumvent the consumer legislation by offering the consumers to agree to a choice of foreign courts and laws which are included in their terms and conditions. Consumers give away the protection of their home state simply by clicking to accept the general terms and conditions on the company's website. The purpose of this article is to examine if the solutions and the experience from the United States and the European Union could serve as a model for transnational protection of consumers in e-commerce. The authors discuss the different levels of protection offered in the United States and the European Union and consider unification of the standards by a multilateral convention.

This research looks into the factors affecting the tracking strategies of e-commerce websites. Each of these factors is analyzed into a deeper view with every factor being sought to reveal its relevance to the topic of study. The factors that have been taken into consideration as having affected the tracking strategies of e-commerce websites include: conversion rate, cost per visitor, order conversion rate, buyer conversion rate, product conversion rate and shopping cart abandonment rate. The research further looks at what other authors have researched and concluded about the factors examined as having an effect on tracking strategies of e-commerce websites. The research elaborates how these factors have influenced website tracking strategies according to different authors, researchers and corporations. Data analyzed in the research was collected using the Likert scale and was analyzed using the AMOS analysis method. All measures were based on items in existing instruments and literature. The researcher used 5 point Likert-Scales where 1 represents "strongly disagree" and 5, "strongly agree." The method is confirmed empirically using confirmatory factor analysis. The research ends with a conclusive summary of the finding of the research on the empirical study of tracking strategies of e-commerce websites.

Consumer knowledge is a very important asset for an organisation. Two types of consumer knowledge have been identified, "knowledge about customers" including customer segments, individual customer preferences, potential customers, and "knowledge possessed by customers" including knowledge about product ranges, companies, and the marketplace. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) offers an ideal medium for the creation and exchange of both types of knowledge. This paper presents the results of an initial phase in a research cycle that looks at e-commerce through the lens of knowledge management. It examines e-commerce provision made by organisations for customers across seven facets ranging from transactional to relational facilities. The results of a selfevaluation of companies' e-commerce propositions are contrasted with customer expectations to determine divergence and alignment. Implications are discussed and conclusions proposed.