week 8

Q1: The business model of eBay is a broker, which brings buyers and sellers together and take a listing fee on products listed over its site and a commission on things sold; both the buyer and seller are a very important part of making the whole process work.
eBay has been successful because it is able to transform many small, primarily local markets into global ones at a low cost to its users.

Q2: ebay enables an online listing of a product for a fee similar to that to put an advertisement in the classifieds, however, eBay provides a greater consumer base than does a newspaper due to the international community. It is eBay’s ability to bring together so many buyers and sellers which has assisted in its success. eBay has little upfront expenses which enables people to become entrepreneurs. Purchasing through eBay can mean the product is purchased at less than market value and encourages buyers to search for the product on eBay first. Owning PayPal has been a good move for eBay as it generates further revenue from this.
(Google Answers, 2011).
Google Answers. (2004). Why is eBay such a successful eCommerce business venture? Retrieved May 7, 2013, from http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=345309

Q3: The eBay Toolbar includes Account Guard to help members to protect their eBay account information. One of the biggest threats to the security of eBay account and members' identity is fraud email and websites. Both are used to obtain personal and account information. To help protect members against this threat, eBay has adopted a strategy including the development technology solutions such as Account Guard and community vigilance. Because of this, eBay users are not very susceptible to fraud at all. Fraudulent activity is still occurring, but there are more and more ways to prevent it. eBay is very quick to point out that it’s only a very, very tiny fraction of all transactions which enter into some kind of significant disagreement.


Q4: The main purpose of this is to bring buyers and sellers together, the customers. eBay drives its whole engine. In order to operate this business model, its vast collection of people who make the marketplace valuable have to participate in a way where they recognize a kind of shared interest in the success of the marketplace. eBay is a prime example of customers forming a community, If their customers work together to negotiate transactions, they pay eBay-fees in terms of there transactions over web sites. Making the community function  play fairly on a level playing field are all vital aspects for eBay to be successful. If people were distrustful of one another and took advantage of each other, the whole model would break down.

Q5: Brand name vendors may choose to set-up shop on eBay because it is cheaper and more easily accessible than a physical store, they can also advertise a larger range of products without the problem of having old stock on the shelves of stores. also with the feedback it is easy to find out what they are doing well and what they could improve on. They are also able to save money on promotion of a new site as well as the ease that customers can find their products.

Q6. In July of 2010 eBay introduced the Accepted Payments policy. Buyers and sellers are given greater protection through insurance and intervention offered by eBay if a transaction was not to unfold in the anticipated manner. Another possible change is the new basic store fees for books. It was recognised that previous rules made it difficult for store owners to make a profit. As such new rules were introduced to make it less expensive. “Insertion fees will be a flat 5c with a final value fee of 9.9%. This will significantly lower the upfront cost for books...(so) that both the seller and eBay share in the success of a sale” (eBay, 2010).

eBay. (2010). New Basic Store fees for Books and Music listings. Retrieved May 7, 2013, from http://www2.ebay.com/aw/au/201007.shtml

Week 7

1) The cyber twin is a good and clever idea, but it does have many flaws. in my opinion, i will prefer speak and learn by lecturer in lecture than have a cyber twin to teach us thought the internet, because if i have a question i can ask the lecturer after the class and i think people to explain is more clear than cyber twin.

2) The Turing test, tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as computer keyboard and screen. (Wikipedia, 2011).  
The Turing test is argued against as the digital computer itself does not possess intelligence. Computers are programmable which possess memory, they do not have the ability to think for themselves, computers are told what to do at the command of the operator. Computers are not things that can respond to changes in the external environment without being programmed in some way to do so, therefore computers are not the kinds of things that can be intelligent.   
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2011). The Turing Test. Retrieved May 6, 2013, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/#ChiRoo
Wikipedia. (2011). Turing test. Retrieved May 6, 2013, fromhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

3) There are many different categories concerning agents. Such categories are:
Mobile agents
Distributed agents
Autonomous agents
Intelligent agents
Fuzzy agents
When discussing whether or not a virtual agent can succeed in delivering high quality customer service over the web, there are a few different things to consider. The internet has many virtual agents. Such companies as Google have agents which when a user/customer put in a word or question into the search engine the agent gives a reply with similar websites relating. This can be successful but also frustrating in my experience. When putting in a word of phrase into the search engine the response is not necessarily correct and might not even be completely relevant. In such cases as Google and other search engines which require agents this demonstrates not always does the agent give high quality customer service. The agent ideally gives the best customer service it can but does not always give the customer what they ideally want (Rappa, 2005).

Rappa,M.(2005) Automata. Retrieved May 6, 2013 from:
http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/automata_tr.html

Week 6

Question 1
a) What experiences have you had with shopping online?
Nowadays, shopping online is very common, i had to shop some clothes, skin product and some of pets stuffs.

b) Describe a good experience.
last few months i bought some make up product in a benefits official website in USA, the product price are cheaper than Australia store. And we can check the shipping online, and the delivery was very fast around 1 weeks the stuffs achieved .

c) What did you like about the online store you used?
Clothes, shoes, skin product and pet's stuffs.

d) Describe a bad experience.
once time, i bought the T-shirt on eBay, and i pick the black color and M size of the T-shirt. After 12 days, i received the wrong color and wrong size T-shirt, i sent email to the seller for many time, but still no one answer me.

e) What problems did you have with the online store?
in my opinion, i think the payment is the problem for me, some website i can pay by visa card, but some online store will not accept the visa payment, such as, eBay, we need to have account of Paypal 

f) What features make an online store more appealing?
i think the function of answer the buyer question directly it can more appealing the customer. i saw some function is the buyer and seller can talk with each other in the website, not the software.

g) What features make an online store less appealing?
some of the online stores have a little information about the product, people can not certain that what quality and what size of the product they are receiving. The time also is a point that cause less appealing, some people may be don't want to wait for the product.

h) Should we expect to see the prices of goods and services rise or fall due to the migration of consumers online?
in my opinion, the price will fail because more people are using online market since companies will need to adapt with the future of shopping and entering in more competition which will reduce the prices

Q2
a) The dispersion of prices (that is, the spread between the lowest and highest price for a particular product) will narrow.
I disagree with this statement because there will always be those high end brands who can demand the higher prices for their products due to their long history or high quality.

b) The importance of brand names will decrease.
I disagree with this statement as there will forever be generations of people who believe that brand names somewhat show the stature of the person. So therefore there will always be people who value brand names more than quality or lower prices.

c) Price competition will make all products cheaper.
I agree with this as all sellers want customers to buy their products and by having the lowest prices in the market, this gives their products a distinct advantage over their competitors.

d) Digital markets will become dominated by a handful of mega-sites, like Amazon.com.
Most defiantly, these mega-sites having the power to buy out smaller rivals who threaten their market share and this allows them to dominate, dictate and be the market leader and continue to expand and grow their brand further.

e) How do you think the balance of power between buyer’s and seller’s will change?
Buyers will defiantly have the upper hand in the future due to the plethora of avenues in which we are able to purchase products. This will allow buyers will be able to demand the lost prices from sellers whilst still buying high quality products at the same time.

f) Prices are clustered online.
I disagree, once again whilst you can still get quality brands for lower prices online, i still don't believe that prices are clustered online. Bigger brands still demand considerably higher prices than smaller companies and this causes a larger variant of prices online.

g) Online prices are elastic. ( i.e. immune to change up and down with demand)
Very much so. I think all prices need to be elastic wether they be from an online seller or in the local shopping mall. Prices must be elastic to change with the differing demand weather it be due the change in seasons or the change in trends.

h) Online prices are generally transparent (the extent to which prices for a given product or service are known by buyers in the marketplace.).
I agree, prices online are generally transparent and you are able to gauge what a product is worth buy looking at a few different sellers sites.

Q3)
a) I am with Telstra and the type of m-commerce services my phone provider offers is the ability to downloads lots of apps for different reasons like games, entertainment, utilities etc. They also provide me with information on how much data I have used on my phone.

b) I pretty much only use this service to access information about my usage.

c) I perform transaction through my phone such as internet banking, eBay, Google; I check the weather, Face book, and email.

d) I haven’t really thought about what I would like to be able to do but currently cant.  I guess just little things like to be able to print web pages from your phone to a printer.

e) My opinion of wireless advertising/mobile marketing is that its so annoying and it frustrates me! The SMS that I get are intrusive and I never reply to the offers and the mobile marketing on some of the apps on my phone just get in the way. When I want to do something on my phone I know exactly what I’m looking for and all the ads around the place are annoying. Actually referring back to question c, I would really like to be able to put a blocker thing on my phone to block all ads appearing on any of my apps and when I’m online!