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Electronic Commerce
By Pete Loshin and John Vacca
Foreword

The dot-coms may have busted, but e-commerce is alive and well. All types of companies
are embracing e-commerce methods and succeeding. From small to large, organizations
around the world are figuring out how to leverage the Internet as a business tool.

To win on the Internet, you must understand where the opportunity is today and how to
prepare for tomorrow. This book is a guide to reality. It shows you where there is
opportunity. It also shows you how to benefit from using the Internet as a practical
business tool and how to reap benefits quickly and permanently. This book shows you
how to succeed in a competitive environment without having to spend millions of dollars
doing so.

You need to know the building blocks, but you also need to know how to put those blocks
together in a winning combination to build a good foundation for your business to grow
and thrive in the world of electronic commerce. The blocks are just like parts to a puzzle.
They will not work unless you properly combine tools, methods, and know how to
exploit opportunity. This book explains Internet business models, business applications
that can be supported on the Internet, and how companies can benefit from using new
models and new tools.

After you learn about the parts and how to put them together to supercharge your
company, you will also need to know how and where to drive your new business
machine. Other how-to-do-business-on-the-Internet books leave you high and dry and
never tell you how to drive. This book shows you how to drive your business like a race
car, how to steer through uncertainty, and how to grip the road so you do not end up in a
dot-com graveyard.

But, you will need more than just the gas pedal if you are going to succeed in electronic
commerce. Entering the world of electronic commerce is like going on a safari or
expedition into unexplored lands. You need to be able to navigate your business into
uncharted territory. You need balance, intuition, and considerable daring if you are going
to maximize the tools of the Internet. You need to know where the edge of the cliff is and
how to not fall off, like so many of those who came before you. That is the big payoff of
this book.

Michael Erbschloe
Educator, Author, and Technology Strategist
Carlsbad, California
Preface

Recent studies suggest that e-commerce is maturing, taking its place as just another retail
channel, and riding the same ups and downs as any of the traditional channels. It is a
piece of news with mixed implications. Perhaps by now, some of the lingering fears about
e-commerce are fading. Or, perhaps e-commerce is losing momentum. The studies raise
more questions than they answer! But, regardless of whether e-commerce needs to
recapture, maintain, or increase its momentum, there are ways that e-commerce may
enhance its appeal. E-commerce may take advantage of technologies designed to make
communications, self-service, and human-computer actions more natural. E-commerce
may avail itself of technologies such as speech recognition and text-to-speech,
encompassing the functionality of interactive voice response, and talking Web voice
portals. Then, e-commerce may train its ears to recognize calls to even greater success.

If you accept that e-commerce is enjoying growth because consumers perceive that it is
secure and convenient, you might ask whether e-commerce could enjoy even more
growth if its security and convenience could be enhanced. No doubt e-commerce could
stand improvement in these respects. No doubt e-commerce users harbor lingering fears
over credit card usage and the safety of personal information.

To the extent there is interest in improving e-commerce, and in promoting additional
growth, there are opportunities for those who may offer communications solutions. For
example, communications solutions could broaden the appeal of e-commerce, helping it
encompass more than PC-based, browser-mediated interactions. E-commerce could be
more natural. It could accommodate the natural, human preference to speak and listen,
instead of confining users to point-and-click interfaces.

The most obvious solution\u2014broad deployment of multimedia PCs, accompanied by a
proliferation of e-tailers capable of managing multimedia sessions, not to mention wider
availability of residential broadband connectivity\u2014is hardly the only solution. Many
potential customers will lack multimedia terminals and broadband connectivity for some
time to come. In any case, many potential customers will balk at always being tied to a
desktop PC. They\u2019ll insist on being mobile, relying on mobile phones and telemetric-
equipped autos. And, whether they\u2019re driving or not, potential customers won\u2019t be too
eager to navigate the limited interfaces presented by tiny keypads and tiny screen
displays.

For customers relying on phones or mobile devices, convenience may come down to
whether they\u2019ll be able to speak and listen their way through commercial transactions.
Such convenience, although seldom raised in mainstream discussions of e-commerce, is a
subject of abiding concern in the communications solutions marketplace. In this
marketplace (through applications such as interactive voice response [IVR]), you\u2019re
already familiar with the challenges of voice-enabling customer interactions. And, you\u2019re
already familiar with the trade-offs posed by efforts to maximize convenience.

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