Internet+ and Electronic Business in China

Qiongwei Ye, Baojun Ma

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787431768
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

PART I

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION OF E-COMMERCE

Time flies. It is now the 17th year since 1999, the year China’s e-commerce was born. In the spring of that same year, Yun Ma set up the Alibaba e-commerce website at a lakeside garden in Hangzhou’s suburb. In the May of 1999, China’s first B2C website selling software books, 8848 went online as operated by LaoRong or Juntao Wang. In the June of 1999, four travel enthusiasts from different industries, namely Nanpeng Shen, Jianzhang Liang, Qi Ji, and Min Fan created Ctrip to provide online ticketing and hotel reservation services. In the August of the same year, Yibo Shao and his alumni from Harvard established Eachnet, China’s first C2C e-commerce network. By the November of 1999, Guoqing Li and his wife Yu Yu, who had both worked in the publishing business for about 10 years, set up China’s first online bookstore, Dangdang. Starting from this year, e-commerce entrepreneurship began to surge and roll, changing people’s living and consuming habits along the way.¹

First, e-commerce has changed the way business is done. A typical scenario in traditional business activities is that a salesperson is “constantly on the move trying to break deals,” while consumers get exhausted looking for commodities they need. In contrast, people now get serviced online by surfing online stores and purchasing all kinds of products via the internet. Businesses contact customers and conduct loan transactions utilizing the internet, and governments conveniently conduct electronic bids and make government purchases. Second, e-commerce changes people’s consumption habits. The most obvious change in online shopping is the dominant customer. This means that the intention of customers to make purchases has become even more important, and consumers can choose to finish a transaction in an easy and self-serving manner, hence fully embodying the dominant role in online shopping. In addition, e-commerce has changed the production of traditional enterprises. For manufacturing enterprises, consumers’ special needs, their individual e-commerce activities, and its social impact, all are presented to manufacturing enterprises via the internet so that an increasing number of businesses are targeting the long-tailed market by producing customized products for consumers. For service enterprises, customized services covering the full spectrum of customers’ life are provided by way of such innovative measures as internet financing, O2O, and localized daily services.²

E-commerce has already changed the world. Yet, in this era of the high speed development of the internet, the rapid spread of intelligent terminals, and a revolutionary surge of big data, e-commerce still retains its unlimited potential of vitality and creativity, given its nature of super sensitivity to its time and technology environment. Therefore, the internet plus e-commerce innovations will become a more important driver of national economic development.

CHAPTER 1

CONNOTATION OF E-COMMERCE

Qiongwei Ye and Baojun Ma

1. DEFINITION OF E-COMMERCE

With the development of information technology and the infiltration of economic globalization, the concept and connotation of e-commerce has never stopped expanding, hence the variant definitions as held by different governments, scholars, and businessmen.

In academe, e-commerce is defined as a technical application concerning businesses and workflow automation using telephone lines, computer network, or other electronic methods. By way of facilitating the sending and transaction of digital information, product, service, and payment between individuals and organizations, e-commerce enables producers, consumers, and the management to cut the cost and enhance the quality of products and services. E-commerce provides enterprises the capabilities to purchase and sell products and information via the internet and online services so that an enterprise’s business processes, application systems, and organizational structure are merged together to form an efficient business model (Kalakota & Robinson, 2001; Kalakota & Whinston, 1996; Laudon & Traver, 2004; Liu, 2007; Liu, Liu, & Wang, 2013).

In the business circle, e-commerce is applied in two categories, namely the narrow sense of definition as electronic commerce and the broad sense definition of electronic business, as most typically used by IBM. Currently, e-commerce mainly refers to such transactional activities as the buying and selling of information, products, and services using computer networks or any interconnected networks, including telecommunication networks, broadcasting and TV networks, and mobile networks. E-business, on the other hand, refers to all economic activities facilitated by electronic connections. Specifically, it refers to the use of computers and network communication technology and information technology (ICT) following certain standards to cover the entire process of business exchanges, administrative operations, logistic services, and other organizational administrative activities. The electronic tools as used here can sometimes refer to the entirety of electronic media, which includes telecommunications network, broadcasting network, and mobile networks. Examples are the electronic market utilizing ICT technology, business networks, and networks that provide services in travel, finance, insurance, customer services, and commodity distribution. In 2002, IBM came up with the idea of “E-Business on Demand” to mean that e-business is easily available when you need it, just like water and electricity. Armed with such on-demand services, an enterprise is easily enabled to comb, optimize, and integrate its business procedure from placing an order to the delivery of the end product. Then electronically the enterprise will be able to integrate the entire supply chain, seamlessly linking important business partners, suppliers, and clients to respond quickly to market opportunities, the needs of its customers, and the external challenge.

Based on the above views from academe and businesses, further defining of the concept of e-business is the logical next step, namely the concept of e-business can be narrowly and broadly defined. The narrow definition refers to only such business activities that closely connect businesses and the internet or other networks that are part of the internet.

The broad definition of e-business includes the narrow definition of e-business, business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource plan (ERP), and SoloMo business models (social, local, and mobile). It refers to business transactions, logistic services, and other organizational activities such as ERP, CRM, SCM, cooperative partnership, competitors, and the interaction with the external environment as facilitated by computer networks or any networks that consist of the internet, such as telecommunication network, broadcasting network, mobile network, social network, and the internet of things. Transaction objects or targets could be products, services, information, or experiences that are able to be transmitted or projected into reality via the internet. The narrow and broad definitions of e-business are shown in Fig. 1.1. During the process of the above-mentioned activities, enterprises have accumulated vast amounts of data of value flow, commodity flow, fund flow, business flow, and people via the intranet, the extranet, and the internet, thus forming “the gold mine of big data” for guiding business operation.

Fig. 1.1. Broad Definition of E-business.

These are transaction data, people data, and data of things. Transaction data include operational performances and internal documents in an enterprise’s intranet and sales turnover contracts in the extranet. People data include data generated in internal social networks as BBS, forum and blog in the intranet, and data in the form of branding in microblog and WeChat, and user comments in commentary platforms in the external social networks. Data of things include inbound logistics data such as commodity QR code, bar code, and FRID in the intranet and outbound data in the form of public transportation imaging data and satellite data in the extranet. As the foundation of big business data, business intelligence via the use of such technologies as ETL, data warehousing, data mining, and data analysis transforms these massive, rapidly upgrading, and structurally complex data into information and knowledge needed for business operational decision-making. In so doing, businesses are enabled to more effectively learn about client needs and implement precise positioning and large-scale customization.

2. EMERGING CHARACTERISTICS OF E-BUSINESS

2.1. E-Business and Big Data

According to Gartner’s definition, big data require a new coping model to deal with information assets that are rapidly increasing, large in volume, and very diverse so as to gain in power of decision making, discerning insightfulness, and procedural optimization. In fact, we can use four Vs to summarize the characteristics of big data, namely volume, variety, value, and velocity. In terms of volume, big data are now so large in volume that its data sets are now beyond the reach of traditional data base software to retrieve, store, manage, and analyze. In terms of variety, the types of data now collected and analyzed can come from such diverse data sources as text, images, audio, or video clips, or even geographical location information. In terms of value, the collected large volume of data contains no small amount of noise, sometimes even reducing the proportion of useful information to less than 1% out of the total. In terms of velocity, due to the constant production and updating of big data, there grows the need for instant analysis and efficiency when it comes to data collection and management. Predictably in the digital future life, big data will pool the information of people, money, and things to connect individuals, organizations, and societies so that information can be used by people in the fields of medicare, transportation, and finance via the use of data application technology.

The era of big data has brought the change of view in e-business and new management model of data, promoting better integration of the actual application of data and business operations, hence upgrading service models. Massive amounts of consumer data provide e-business enterprises the tool to learn about users’ consumption model. This enables the enterprises to provide via the use of big data personalized, intelligent, and precision advertisement push services to establish more interesting and effective service models. At the same time, e-business enterprises could also use big data to locate better methods or channels to increase user loyalty, market new products or services, and reduce operational costs. According to Liu, Chen, and Yao (2014), specific e-business models in the big data era might include the following.

2.1.1. Personalized Shopping Guide as Based on Big Data

The e-business model of personalized shopping guide comes from the combination of personalized services and third-party service providers. This model demands the aggregation of big data, which include such records as a user’s browsing history, shopping history, and consuming preferences. Via data mining, precision shopping guide can be achieved by the use of personalized advertisements and recommendations. Appropriate advertisements can be recommended for the user based on the big data of consumer behavior, analysis of the user’s web browsing behavior, and the most appropriate and currently needed products recommended after the analysis of everyday behavior. Precision marketing by demand will greatly reduce the marketing cost of e-business enterprises and promote increase in sales.

2.2. Vertical Segments Service Based on Big Data

In the big data era, with the increase in data integration capacity, e-business enterprises are enabled to more easily and more conveniently share information and resources with their upstream and downstream supply chain, thus greatly blurring the obvious boundary between ent...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Part I Theoretical Foundation of E-Commerce
• Part II Internet + E-Business Model Innovations
• Part III E-Business Platform Applications
• Part IV Practice of Internet + E-Business Projects
• About the Authors
• Index