Risk Factors in E-Commerce
With more and more of consumers purchasing items over the internet and relying less and less on brick and mortar store, e-commerce has been a lucrative target for criminals. There is relatively less risk in being caught and prosecuted if a criminal targets potential victims through e-commerce. Crimes committed over e-commerce channels require specialized training to investigate and have the potential to over numerous agencies, jurisdictions and even countries. This crossing of judicial and governmental jurisdiction can often impede the investigation or even prevent prosecution. There are several other risk factors that effect e-commerce. The most critical risk factors have been identified in the areas of availability, performance, scalability, and security.
If your website is down, then you are not doing any business. The availability of your site is critical to your business reputation and ability to sell its services. Does the organization have the ability to quickly and effectively manage or mitigate issues that affect its availability? A developing trend for criminals is to perform a denial of service attack on a business. This is when a hacker has the ability to block access to your website. The hacker can either deny your ability to access your systems, deny consumers from accessing your system or both. Some organized crime elements have used this method to extort funds from business in order for the business to access their site. It is essential for business have the ability to mitigate the effectiveness of these attacks.
Performance of your site has to be up to par with your competitors. If your site is slow or reacts erratically, it is unlikely consumers w...
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...me type of finical assistance or insurance to help cover the expenses of breaches to your network or lose of consumer personal information?
Businesses today understand the importance and financial gains of e-commerce. That is why business invests heavily to ensure the consumers safety and build confidence in e-commerce. Dispute the numerous security measures and protocols, it is essential for business and consumers to stay aware of potential risks. The sad reality is that e-commence risk prevention is more reactive and proactive in nature. The safeguards in place are usually reactions to successful breaches.
Works Cited
Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2011). Essentials of Management Information Systems. Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Stout, G. (2011). Critical Risk Factors in an E-Commerce Enviroment. Rackspace Knowledge Center .
In todays fast pace world of technology many of us leave ourselves vulnerable to become victims of a cybercrime. With people using the internet to do everything from paying bills, personal banking, and on-line shopping their financial and personal information is available at the stroke of a key to a hacker. Often someone is unaware that they have been attacked and had their information stolen. The use of the internet has grown exorbitantly throughout the world. Nelson Online reported that as of December 31, 2014, there were 360,985,492 users of the internet throughout the world. (2015) With so many users in so many countries accessing the internet, prosecuting cybercrimes is nearly impossible.
The growth of online business has grown enormously over the years. Cliptomania is a family operated and owned small e-business that primarily sells clip on earrings (Brown, DeHayes, Hoffer, Martin, & Perkins, 2012, p. 308). Cliptomania early developments were very modest, and as such the company experienced copious strategic dilemmas. An initial strategic dilemma that the company encountered when establishing and building their new e-business undertaking was to create a website for the business operations and essentially to have it fully operable. The owners, Jim and Candy elected to hire a vendor to host the website and additionally utilize the IT systems resources of the vendor to sustain their business. At the very beginning they exploited the offerings of the Yahoo Store. However, continuing down this avenue of using the services of the Yahoo Store inevitably became too costly. By using the services and business offerings of a vendor made it convenient and effortless for Jim and Candy to start their e-business store. Unfortunately the couple did not have much in the way of professional help, and so they had to create and put together the website by themselves. Additionally they also had to deal with establishing their online credibility as many customers preferred to call in their orders just to talk with a real person before being comfortable enough to place their orders via the webpage.
When an organization determines that e-commerce is an option that is going to be offered to consumers, the organization needs to realize that as a whole the organization is going to be exposed to new risks, such as, fraud and viruses. Regulatory mechanisms for e-business are not yet in place in many countries. This causes B2B and B2C sites to be based around trust, trust in the organization that has been chosen, either for business or consumer purposes (Chaker, 2005).
LAUDON, K. C. 2010. Management information systems : managing the digital firm, Upper Saddle River, NJ : Pearson/Prentice Hall, c2010.
Nevertheless, if you fail to provide the results your clients want, no matter how hard you worked, there are thousands of other professionals waiting for their chance. You do all the right things, but if you can’t raise the domain authority of the website or increase their search engine results, your clients will look elsewhere. In the end, the metrics matter the most to clients.
Laudon, KC & Laudon, JP 2010, Management Information Systems: Managing the digital firm, 11th Global edn, Pearson Education, Inc, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
For a website to be successful, you must have clear identified goals and compelling content that draws your audience to your site again and again. A good site requires a delicate balance between content, visual appeal and technology, but most of all content (Leonard-Wilkonson, n.d.). Knowledge of the market, product or service and business environment is also essential if you are going to improve business (Barnett & O'Rourke, 2006).
Some of the strengths our company has are the cost advantages of hosting a web-based business, unique services in monthly website maintenance, and a customer-centric design. Another strength is having two business partners: one that is focused on design, and one that is focused on programming. The design structure of the company shows that both areas of website development will be superior because each part, the design and the programming, will be completed by a professional in the area. Because there are no other web development business in the area that provide monthly maintenance, more customers will be willing to pay for this service to be provided to them. The cost of possessing a web-based company, rather than a store-based one is much lower, making the company easier to start and maintain. Finally, the company has developed a customer-centric design, g...
The e-commerce industry is one of most profitable segments in the US economy as well as global economy. E- Commerce Industry Report underlines that all companies which are included in the statement have remarkable revenue growth. While the global economy continues to improve, many consumers in North America and Europe continue to invest heavily in the market and in the IT technology. The data protection and security are significant factors for investors and consumers. Moreover, e- commerce is an example of an industry that grows by acquisitions which provide a greater opportunity to penetrate new geographic platforms.
Recently, the Internet has become the most significant technology in all over the world, which is not only used by the people to contact with each other but also utilized by the business organizations to become global (Taylor, Caeti, Loper, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2006). Computer and internet enable the business organizations to execute the Electronic commerce business model, which has become very popular. Computers and Internet are a powerful source in the success of globalization and international business. Computers are being used worldwide and due to this, cyber crimes are increasing continuously with a rapid growth (Cheeseman, 2006).
I recently came across an article that discussed how customers placed more importance on certain parts of a company’s web page than others. It was also revealed that people are increasingly placing focus upon the actual look of website and the layout used. The aesthetics of a page, along with the loading times and content features, are more important now as they ever have been.
The purpose of risk management is to protect an organization’s valuable assets information, hardware, and software. The purpose of risk management process is to identify and manage risks in such a way that a company is able to meet its strategic and financial targets. Risk management is a continuous process, by which the major risks are identified, listed and assessed, the key persons in charge of risk management are appointed and risks are prioritized according to an assessment scale in order to compare the effects and mutual significance of risks. It is very important that the organizations and business to be very well prepared to see what kind of risk we are facing, or the business can suffer in case of a major disaster.
Hardware is the first element addressed; servers, system memory, and hosting decisions will be reviewed. The second portion is software and includes items such as design, security and data storage. To make the web site available to customers, connectivity issues and options will be examined. A comparison to sites such as Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and E-Trade is also included. A lot of customer expectations will have been established by those websites and Primus will have to include many of the same offerings and then add something extra to win customers.
Technology is moving ahead of a rapid pace and reinventing the way business is done. E-business has the potential to affect every part of the value chain, from inbound logistics and operations through to outbound logistics, marketing and after sales support. Forecasts indicate that in 2001 e-business will top U.S. $ 434 billion and much of that will be in business-to-business transactions. The advantages are clear, e- business can help cut costs, link supply chains more efficiently and service markets more effectively. Scalability, flexibility, security, performance and back end integration are all vital issues, getting architect right is the key. While online services are growing, security measures are becoming more of a concern.
Laudon C. & J. Laudon (2003: 5th edition) Essentials of Management Information Systems. London: Prentice Hall International Limited