-Web Biz-: Assignment 1#comment-form

-Web Biz-: Assignment 1#comment-form

Week 1/ Pirates and punishment

Online retailers have to deal with shoplifting, but it is often called piratcy, and they lose billions of dollars a year.  In one case, two young men matthew Purse and Christopher Walters pirated software from "Apple, Corel, McAfee, and set-up bogus online accounts that they stole from unknowing consumers"(http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3858586).  These two young men portrayed themselves as legitmate online retailers on eBay to sell their stolen recopied software; and also took customers' application information.  In 2008 alone software retailers' reported losing $53. Billion dollars to pirates.  Two agencies that have been making attempts to catch these pirates, is the SIIA and the Federal Trade Commission.  Matthew Purse was sentenced to eight years in a federal prison and hundered of thosands of dollars in fines, but, Christopher Walters is still on the run.  The laws are still to vague on how to prosecute perpretrators like these two men; and also how much prison time should be placed on the books for state and federal judges to have as guidelines.  The World Wide Web is so vast and it can be hard to find pirates (like finding a needle in a haystack).  Many of these online thiefs are very intelligent and know how to cover their tracks by using fake server addresses and other technology.

Work Cited:

Another eBay Pirate heads To Prison-e-commerce-Guide.com
www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3858586

Assignment I/ The Long Tail and issues of Cyberspace

After reading 'The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson; I noticed that there are many issues of online e-commerce that I never thought about before as a former business owner.  For instance, how Mr. Anderson explained how one book called "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauner reserected a book that published a decade earlier with a similiar story line about mountain climbing disasters (www.wired.com/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html).  Amazon.com was very keen with their marketing research and noticed if the book "Into Thin Air" was on the best selling list that they should bring back by Mr. Simpson's "Touching The Void"; in which became a best-seller too.  Amazon, eBay, and many other online retailers use cookies that enable the companies to tell what their potential and existing customers niches or likes and dislikes of the products they sell; thus this is an economical way of bringing these products to the online market places.  Online retailers have an advantage over brick and mortar stores because they do not have the same overhead and they can sell their products all over the world.  Mr. Anderson also stated during his research that the Pureto's Principle statistical principle of the 80/20 rule states that for most retailing operations, that only 20% of the movies, videogames, and books will be the best or most popular items to sell (www.wired.com/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html).  Well, Mr Anderson found out that this wasn't the case with most online retailers and the 98% rule was most applicable to the companies that he researched because even if one product sold in the product line-up that the graph would never reach zero on the tail end of the graph (Anderson, 2006 and 2008, pp. 6-7).  Please see Chris Anderson's video describing the 80/20 rule at (http://www.youtube.com/watch?y=0Yku0GTrcuw&feature=fvw).  Mr. Anderson describes the 98% rule that retailers' like Rhapsody online jukebox states that it sells that amount of its songs at least 4 or 5 times a month as "long-tailed distributions"; because the end of the line on the X axis is longer than the head of the Y axis (Anderson, 2006, 2008, pp. 10-11).  Mr. Anderson also states there are three rules for this statistical graph: (1)  the tail of the x axis is longer due to the infinite availability of products online; (2) it's cheaper to carry these niche items in databases and; (3) all the niches, when sold and added up, makes a larger market for both the consumer and the online retailers' (Anderson, 2006, 2008, pp. 10-11).  This enables the online retailers to make more money compared to a brick and mortar store; and also helps consumers to find the products and services that they cannot find elsewhere.