A review on a post on Legal from My E-Commerce blog

Another SMS and New SMS Scams

Scam and spam has been feared by many due to untrustworthiness of those scandals. Many are victimized by the tricks of SMS scams claiming that they have won prizes which they didn't. Those scams are mainly to con into getting money without consent. Many of these are advertised via SMS or e-mail because those medias are frequently used by many people. Thus, it is easier to prey them by using this trick.

From the blog review, I think that due to the widespread of scam cases, most people with mobile phones should beware with them. Thus, I completely agree that government should help lower the case of scamming. In fact, there are many parties can help lower the SMS scam by alerts and mentioned in the blog; be aware when disclosing financial and personal Identity Number.

Next, scams happened almost everytime. This is why new scams always occur. Statement such as 'memenangi hadiah' is used to persuade mobile users to reveal their identity and account informations. Lately, many cases from Akademi Fantasia SMS scam are noticed by public. This is getting serious until ATM machines are forced to send out alerts.

Overall, the blog is a good and it alerted us to beware of upcoming increasing number of scam threats and new scams found especially from Indonesia and other neighboring countries. It is hoped that many readers will take precaution of the hoax.

Related link(s): http://ecommerze.blogspot.com/search/label/Legal

Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

Blogging, a method used by many to get attention from users and to express their feelings, products and services and also towards particular organizations. It is indeed a useful tool to marketing the products especially new ones and highly rated. In most organizations, usage of blogging to express their products have become a new culture for marketing. More effective than advertising because it saves cost and the person in charge can write all about the product's description where advertisement can't

It is known that corporate blog are divided to two which are external and internal. Internal ones are supported via Intranet services where users required to log in. It is useful as forum for interorganization's users. In addition, those informations cannot be stolen by outsiders. On the other hand, external blog is for public viewing. It enables users to edit or it can be secured. Comment posts are free for viewers.
From this website http://direct2dell.com/one2one/ from Dell Blogspot, the number of readers are high and the comments too. From the website, we are able to notice that there is a shopping cart to order computers and laptops. Besides, it has list of awards and community services. It is indeed a good space for e-tailing, discussion and forums combinations.

Dell blogspot became successful due to the engagement with key bloggers that took about a year. Besides, the organization hired staffs that are required to respond to the bloggers. Since then, the relationship with consumers grow and of course, the feedback will be good and encouraging them to join as bloggers. With that, Dell could easily advertise their products to the bloggers and finally grown as the web encouraging more customers to participate. The effect is positive because Dell could adopt continuous improvement based on the feedbacks.

Blogging has its disadvantage because it may become a target place for hackers and hoax. However, it will bring profits if the users use it effectively due to its save cost method of promoting of products rather than adverts and samples.

More at http://www.helium.com/items/254062-the-pros-and-cons-of-corporate-blogging

A review on a post on e-tailing from My E-Commerce blog

Since Touch N Go was introduced, it actually enhances the convenience of its users. We can see that it increases the speed of paying for tolls, KTM services and other services like Rapid KL. In addition, those who use Touch N Go are given privilege as ATM card, credit card and so forth. These combinations are preferable because consumers can have only one card to do many transactions and are given bonuses such as reward points.

With e-Tailing becoming more important, many organizations are moving into implementing it. With the introduction of e-tailing, many companies are benefited from the convenience of the services. Touch N Go again implemented it due to the finding that it is good for multiple usage and easier for applicants to use it anywhere at anytime. After subscribing it, the applicants can load in money and uses it else where with a single card.

It encourages safeness because customer need not bring too much money to travel.
From the review, I agreed that Touch N Go should expand its services to food outlets. It will increase the number of customers and also to generate more revenues. Since the food outlets are becoming more important, it is predicted that the profitability of Touch N Go will increase if the expansion of services to food outlets if it becomes a reality.

More information, please visit

http://www.touchngo.com.my/AboutUs_CompBG.html

Electronic Currency

Being in business world nowadays, the organization is not oriented only in one location but globally. Having this situation, what should an organization do when come to questions about making payments especially those that conduct businesses using licensing and franchising. Some businesses even bothered to do make payments using checks and credit cards. Signature, confirm payment and so forth make things worst and slow so with the idea of electronic currency, it enhances working speed and precision for making payments.

Electronic currency known also as e-cash, digital money or digital currency are used particularly for making payments online and exchanged electronically mostly involving computer networks. One of the best company that introduced this method of payment is Payloadz. https://www.payloadz.com/

Payloadz is a electronic currency company that provides services for downloadable items like Mp3, digital arts, movies and more. However, the services integrated with PayPal and users have to do payment using PayPal methods. It also reflects its benefits such as security measures, free first time Premium accounts and lifetime Basic accounts and so forth. Also given is money back guarantee of 150% is users aren not satisfied with the product or services. Thus, it is an assurance that the company is so successful that the sales increases up to 1000%.

Next is Paystone which sees its usage for mailing of money. The price may be as low as $0.25. It shows its convenience, inexpensive way of transfer funds, instant and secure. Group Pay services especially reveals its importance to make payments to multiple parties. On the other hand, the Merchant service is to secure the transfer of funds and allow customers to pay per view for the contents. This would increase the profit for the company. However, the service requires only ATM to make payment.

Paystone weblink:

http://www.paystone.com/support/index.php?PHPSESSID=jeh24lekgdp3e4kbeimq2eu760
http://www.paystone.com/company/index.php

An example of an E-Commerce failure and its causes

As many companies adopting e-commerce found the successes of doing so, some companies however failed to sustain its competitive advantages. Probably the increasing of online threats and breakdowns created hostile environment to such organizations. As eBay emerged as best auctioning organization, there are controversies of why e-commerce failed to provide the best services to the company.

Reported in June 10 to 11, 1999 eBay had to temporarily close the site for 22 hours due to web failure. Significant failures also experienced by eBay and several outages have since suffered which totaled up to more than 70 hours during the first seven months. During the crisis, the stock market plummeted making it suffered $5.7 billion loss of market capitalization.

When examined by the experts, it is revealed that the database were corrupted and needed rebuilding which causes the prolonged outages and eBay failure in provision of redundant and scallable web architecture. Besides, e-commerce requires more expertise and marking one of the failures is due to lack of experts in eBay to update and maintenance of the site to keep it running. With the complexity of the website due to geographical expansion, it is difficult to maintain well of the website and it is also a cause of several outages to occur.

Controversies also occur about the account stealing in eBay.com. Report shows that eBay was vulnerable to attacks such as SQL injections and IFrame code directing users to Trojan infected website. The attack known as phishing cannot be detected during electronic transaction and is proved to be failure to e-commerce. As a result, eBay have to increase the cost to shun those attacks from its website. Next, attack from hacker namely 'Valduz' from Romania to breach the security of eBay. Other problems occurred is due to online gambling services that are illegal was aided by eBay and other subsidiaries including PayPal. Result is, they have to pay $10 million fine. The bottom line is, no matter how develop the e-commerce is, due to its benefits, many are misusing it and it is agreeable that this is the failure of e-commerce to overcome such situations.

The conclusion is, no doubt e-commerce sees more of its benefits, but it requires many expertise to deal with and to provide security as more threats are reported nowadays. With the introduction of more viruses such as Malware, Adware and other cyber crimes by hackers to misuse the e-commerce system, it becomes a limitation to many organizations that adopted this method of business.

Related link(s):

http://www.oag.state.ny.us/investors/1999_online_brokers/points_reference.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebay#Controversy_and_criticisms

An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes

Increasing number of IT (Information Technology) users are encouraging even businesses to take part in online business namely e-commerce. Introduced as Electronic Data Change (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) around 1970s to send purchase order and invoices. The fast development of e-commerce allowed more companies to implement it.

One of them is eBay.com. The company found by a stranger, an Iranian descend born in France, Pierre Omdiyar realized that e-commerce actually provides many benefits and it can help to boost an organization's wealth. Started with auctioning a broken laser printer, and the success of the sales encouraging him to auction more products. With e-commerce, it helps him to communicate with bidders through e-mail and customer services. As eBay.com went public on 21st September 1998, the company increased the number users and bidders. Due to the successes, eBay purchased PayPal, also an e-commerce pay-per-click site and the number of revenues from advertising, subscription and many more rocketed due to the benefits of e-commerce. Around June 2005, 15000 members of eBay Developers Program was introduced enabling software developers to intergrate with eBay. This measure was taken to support the buyers and sellers and the affiliates and one of the successes of e-commerce into playing the role in eBay.

The convenience usage of e-commerce helps eBay into auctioning more products such as collectibles, decors, furnitures and more and even unused items and celebrities' properties. In addition, to users from other countries excluding US and UK, it is required that they use PayPal services. This method encouraged eBay to gather more revenue because of the services provided and advertisement from this site after limiting more products to using PayPal as payment service. Another success shown by eBay after implementing e-commerce is the introduction of eBay express. It works faster because the introduction of eBay express is to the users of United States using addresses. Buyers can load products from multiple sellers into shopping cart provided in the website and it is a smarter way of doing transactions by eBay.

With more successes seen after adopting e-tailing by eBay, there are more sites introduced like eBay Community Wiki, an e-commerce method of Questions& Answers guides to users and eBay Blog site as forum, Chat Room and Discussion Board. More e-commerce benefits reflected and eBay adopted such as SMS and WAP alerts via mobile phones and many more. There are specialties sites that are shown as e-commerce successes such as Best of eBay for finding most unusual items and eBay Pulse to providing information about best sellers and most searched items.

Notice that most eBay websites worked with the use of e-commerce accept for shipping the products. The profit sustained by eBay is tremendous. Revenue from eBay are generally through fees and per listing fees may up to $ 80. Only in Mexico, eBay gained profit of 1% of the successful sales and in UK alone, eBay may mark its profit of £0.15 to £3. And in 2008, the profit from usage of PayPal increased 17% and in eBay alone, it increased 61% all reflected by total payment volume from both sites and of course, eBay move forward to expanding the international trades to many countries with different domain name.

Conclusion, e-commerce plays an important role in many organizations. Not only due to its convenience but smart usage and less time consuming, thus it is a success to most organizations that adopted this business strategy. As a result, many organizations not only eBay but Amazon.com and Google as well has successfully gained wealth for their companies.

Related link(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebay#Profit_and_transactions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebay#Items_and_services

The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

As Information Technology becoming more important in our life for providing services like general knowledge, transactions and gaming, it has since became a target for many threats. Viruses and hackers has been long became a threat to computer softwares and internet tools create doubts about the credibility of companies that provided services with those tools. Many reports have been lodged regarding data losses, account cloning, phishing and so forth are all due to expanding of cyber criminals.

Criminals might use traditional method of stealing a computer and access through the datas to obtain relevant informations that benefited them or more high tech way of stealing the datas through computer languages softwares like SQL, C++ or many more. Those without authorized keylock are of course more vulnerable to stolen datas reported because it enables anyone to accessing it. This is why many organizations provide intranet services requiring the users to use their ID and passwords often alphanumerical to create more secured environment from data theft. From my opinion, these are not enough because even with a secured password, still there are hackers that may log in and steal the datas like what has happened to many clone credit cards reported during the 2001 to 2002 from Malaysian banks. Thus, it is recommended that organizations that operated web based to have SSL encrypted as a matter of trust to users.

Online downloading is often an area to spread viruses and is a favorite target for hackers to insert spywares. Such sites are mostly porn sites and unapproved downloading sites because they did not include certificates authentication. Easily a hacker can place malicious worms in the softwares fro downloads by users. As a result, program failures often reported due to the worms like trojans and other bugs. Furthermore, some viruses are too powerful it can crack into important documents and steal the datas.

Therefore, it is more important that we learn how to safeguard our data. These are important steps to secure our computer from data theft:

First, User Account is more important to unable unauthorized people to log in your computer. First method of preventing data duplication and theft. It is also recommended that for different users, you create different accounts if the organization is large.

Second, it is important to ensure what anti virus are you using and is it firewalled to disable unwanted programs to penetrate into our computer. Anti virus must be updated and properly licensed to avoid breakdowns. It is recommended that you use latest Anti Virus such as AVG 8.0 rather than older versions because more functions are added and stronger to protect the computer systems.

Third, scanning the computer is essential. Regular scan is recommended to avoid unauthorized data to be stored that probably contained virus or corrupted files in the storage. I'm sure more computers are provided the Rootkit Revealer software that can detect malicious activities in the computer. Remember to scan pendrives or disks before opening to avoid virus contained files

Fourth, try to avoid unused software or programs because they might be corrupted if no longer used. Uninstall them if those programs are no longer necessary in use.

Fifth, Windows Update is recommended to be turned on. Important updates can help protect the computer from attackers so that they have disadvantage to known vulnerabilities.

Sixth, put up your rules as guideline so that there will be no unwanted activities on your computer systems. As example, UTAR put up a signboard that warned on step by step shutdown of computer. Children Safe Online is also a guideline to data protection and also adopted by Live Messenger such as Family Care software.

Next, you are recommended to use password and manage the authorization on important datas. This is useful if your computer are used openly by many parties. To safeguard the data, you may set the security level, hide the folder, encrypt or manage password.

Lastly, what is more important is not to give out important informations like Personal ID, PIN number and account informations especially when doing online transactions. Make sure the websites you've visited contained approved licensed and certificates such as VeriSign stamp in http://www.maybank2u.com/. Some websites provide trust because of SSL encryption in it.

Related link(s):
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-primary-online-security-threats.htm
http://www.guard-privacy-and-online-security.com/