***Revenue Models for Google, Amazon.com and eBay***

Revenue models describe methods of generating profits of an organization. There are various types of revenue models, includes advertising, sales, transaction fee, subscription, affiliate and so forth.

Google is a search engine which most of the people prefer. Most of the income generated by Google is from advertising which are Google Adwords, Google AdSense and Google Product Search.

Google Adwords is a pay per click advertising program that designed to allow advertisers reach people when they are actively looking for information relate to what the advertiser are offering. Advertisers only pay when people click on their advertisement.

Google AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Google AdSense automatically delivers text and image ads that are precisely targeted to web publishers’ site and owner site content, people will actually find them useful. And when web publishers add Google WebSearch to their site, AdSense delivers targeted ads to their search results pages too.

Froogle has been renamed “Google Product Search” says Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search & User Experience, is a searchable and browsable shopping index tuned to find information about products for sale online.

Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce (e-commerce) company in Seattle, Washington and yet Amazon was one of the first major companies to sell goods by Internet. Amazon.com started as an on-line bookstore to gain income, but soon diversified itself into various types of product lines such as video home system (VHS), DVD, music CDs, MP3 format, computer software, video game, toy and etc. Amazon.com also receives affiliates fees such as commission and per-unit fees from sellers through Amazon Enterprise Solution.

eBay is the major auction service on the Web. eBay popularized the concept of buying and selling online, and both individuals and commercial enterprises list items for sale. There is no charge to browse the site or make bids and purchases, but there is a fee to list items. If an item is purchased, the seller pays eBay an additional fee. It generated revenue from its three primary businesses: auctions, PayPal payment service and Skype voice over IP (VoIP) service.

Related link(s)

• www.google.com


• www.amazon.com


• www.ebay.com

**Prepared by ShihTing**

☆The history and evalution of E-commerce☆

Today, everyone known E-commerce and it is very popular in the world. But did you really understand what E-commerce is?? E-commerce is also called as Electronic commerce or eCommerce, it consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in the way of spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.

The history and evolution of E-commerce as below:
In 1970s
~Meaning of E-commerce is the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using technology, example are Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT).
~There were allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders(PO) or invoices(Inv.) electronically.

In 1980s
~Growth and acceptance of credit card, automated teller machines (ATM) and telephone banking and were also forms of E-commerce.
~In 1984, EDI was standardized through ASC X12. This guaranteed that companies would be able to complete transactions with one another reliably.

In 1990s
~E-commerce would additionally include enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing.
~In 1994, Netscape arrived. It provided to users a simple browser to surf the Internet and a safe online transaction technology called Secure Sockets Layer.

~In 1995, two of the biggest names in e-commerce are launched, their are Amazon.com and eBay.com.

~In 1998, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) provides fast and always-on Internet service to subscribers across California. This prompts people to spend more time and money to online. E-commerce needed to take four years to develop the security protocols (HTTP) and it which allowed rapid access and connection to the internet.
~In 1999, Business.com sold for US $7.5 million to eCompanies and the peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster launches.

In 2000s
~A great number of business companies in the United States and Western Europe represented their services in the World Wide Web (WWW). It changed the meaning of the E-commerce as the process of purchasing of available goods and services over the Internet using secure connections and electronic payment services.
~In 2000, the dot-com bust but the “brick and mortar” retailers recognized the advantages of E-commerce and began to add some capabilities to their web sites. Other than that, U.S government extended the moratorium on Internet taxes.

Recently, we can see that Amazon.com and eBay.com are very successful in online purchases, it is because the network improvement and it become more safety at online banking.

Related Links:
http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/articles/electronic_commerce_aka_e_commerce_history
http://www.ecommerce-land.com/history_ecommerce.html
http://newmedia.medill.northwestern.edu/courses/nmpspring01/brown/Revstream/history.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce

Posted by Toh Jin Huey

E-commerce Benefits: Reducing Cycle Time, Improve Employees' Empowerment and Facilitate Customer Support

Nowadays, E-commerce is getting more popular as E-commerce enables the suppliers and consumers to sell or purchase the purchase the products and services. Now, i am going to share some of the benefits by using E-commerce.

Cycle time is the total amount of time between the consumer making order and receiving the goods. For example, if the customer wants to make an order, it just need a few seconds. Besides, it only takes 2 or 3 working days for the goods to be delivered to recipient. As E-commerce can reduce the cycle time, it not only can decrease the carrying costs and shrinkage costs, it also can increase the revenue and competitive advantage and improve the cash flow.

Now, let me give you an example of a company - Dell. Dell company having an online shopping without any limited country and also timing, It operates for 24 hours per day and no off day during any public holiday. If you want to buy any product from this company, you no need to think when can buy the product because the transaction is available at all the time. This is not only benefit of E-commerce but also benefit the consumers by giving them a convenience, fastest speed and lowest cost that can reduce the cycle time to process the online shopping.

Employees' empowerment becomes a very important issue to an organization producing services. They need to give the employee to have the power to make any decisions regarding their jobs or tasks because this can makes the employees have the responsibility of the quality of service that delivered to the customers. In order for the management to trust that their employees are successful in dealing with their customers, the management has to give the employees authority and support to succeed at it. For example, they should let the employees to respond the feedback or comment that given by the customer.

E-commerce facilitates customer support by providing customer the opportunity to shop more convenient. Other than that, if the customer has any question, they can go through the Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section because this section has the answer they wanted. But, if there did not have any answer they want, they can contact the person-in-charge that mention at the contact us or just e-mail to the mail address that given. Besides that, E-commerce provides 24 hours operation. So that, if they get any complaint from the customer, they will use the fastest speed to complete the problem and update the new information to let the customer know about it.

In conclusion, E-commerce has brought many benefits to the consumer such as reducing cycle time, improve employees' empowerment and facilitate customer support during our daily life. Hope everyone can spread it around the world.

Reference Link:
http://www.remarkable.co.nz/ebusiness_cost_benefit.htm


~Post by Wendy Lee~

An example of an E-commerce success and its causes--- eBay

eBay is a global online marketplace where practically anyone can trade practically anything. Launched in 1995, eBay started as a place to trade collectibles and hard-to-find items.

eBay founded in Pierre Omidyar's San Jose, a computer programmer, wrote the code for an auction website that he ran from his home computer in September 1995. It was from start meant to be a marketplace for the sale of goods and services for individuals.

Today, eBay is the world's largest online community of buyers and sellers. With a global presence in 38 markets, including the US, and over 241 million registered users worldwide, eBay offers boundless opportunity to come together in one Internet site and be able to buy and trade a wide range of items, including fine collectibles. It allows people pursue their interests and their passions in the areas of their hobbies and their collectibles.

eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on the Internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brought together in a manner where sellers are permitted to list items for sale, buyers to bid on items of interest and all eBay users to browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, where each type of auction has its own category. It's convenient and easy to be found by people.

eBay has both streamlined and globalized traditional person-to-person trading, which has traditionally been conducted through such forms as garage sales, collectibles shows, flea markets and more, with their web interface. This facilitates easy exploration for buyers and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sale within minutes of registering.



eBay has done a regular basis to promote eBay, they have had isolated campaigns through radio and print, and they've also done some tradeoffs and some banner ads on other sites. But the really unique thing about eBay is that when compare theirs to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, they have done very little external promotion to build membership.

eBay is such a unique community that they've been able to build their membership through the word-of-mouth of their users and they've also attracted new members due to the amount of media attention that has come to the site in the past few years.

Another cause has helped to make eBay as successful as it has been, is that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar. They enjoy looking around for merchandise. The other component is they really enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain, and in some way, shape or form, likes to haggle a little bit over the price. eBay's auction format allows users to do that.

Obviously, people are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping online and they're getting more and more accustomed to doing that. That's another factor why eBay is grateful.

Related links:
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~magnus/ief248a/eBay/history.html
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/2127.html
http://news.ebay.com/about.cfm

Posted by Moo Hui Sin