This survey was based on some questionnaires

1. Are you Familiar with e-commerce?

a. Yes c. Partial b. No
These percentage values are calculated over 500 literate popu-
lations.

E-commerce familiar percentage values over

500 literate populations.

2. Did/do you use/access this service?

a. Yes b .No
3. Do you agree that e-commerce can provide an alternative
marketing channel by eliminating middleman?
a. Yes b. No
4. According to you, is e-commerce suitable or traditional
business model for our facilities?
a. Traditional b. E-commerce

These percentage values are calculated over absolute and

partial familiar population to E-commerce.

5. How do you access this site?

a. Cell phone b. PC
.6. Did you buy any products from E-commerce sites?
a. Yes b. No
These percentage values are calculated over the population
who only access the sites.

7. How do you pay to buy products /services?

a. Online payment b. Other

8. Which type of business model did you use?

a. b2b b. b2c c. c2c

9. Are you satisfied to receive /get their services?

a. Yes b. Partial c. No
 Survey on E-commerce service provider parties
The survey was based on some important questionnaires re-
garding the online business perspective. This assessment is
done through the existing 17 online market sites over the
country (BD). The questions are the following:

1. What Kinds of business model do you run?

(a) b 2 b (b) b2c (c) c2c

2. Mention the major revenue models used in your E-

commerce site.
a. Sales of goods b. Advertise c. Transaction fee
d. Subscription fees
e. Referral fee

3. Do you follow any privacy policy in your site? :

(a) Yes (b) No

4. Is this site cover over the world or designed to service for

local area?
a. Local b. Global

5. What are the payment systems in your site?

(a). Manual system (b). Online payment system

6. Does it support any types of currencies?

(a) Local currency (b) Foreign currencies

7. Who are the target audience of your site?

(a) Local (BD) (b) Outside the country

8. Do you thing that the Govt. of BD is doing its enough to

promote e-commerce in Bd.
(a)Enough (b) Partial (c) Not at all

9. Do this site has contractual policy with any products deliv-

ery parties (Post office, currier service, S.A Paribahan, etc)
for delivering products?
(a) Absolutely (b) partial

10. Does this site follow marketing to explore online busi-

ness?
(a) Fully (b) Partly (c) No
 ARISING CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS AND
EFFECTIVENESS
Challenges
There are huge challenges that should be overcome before
start ecommerce. Some of these are as follows.

 Lack of education
 Govt. / Pvt. Corporation noninvolved
 Cultural tradition
 Poor concept of online marketing
 Poor ICT education and training
 Internet usage cost high
 No proper agreement for shipping
policy
 Lack of Privacy policy
 Feeble Site development and
maintenance
 Less marketing or promote
 Lack of education
 Lack of education
 Lack of education
  Cultural tradition
 Poor concept of online marketing
 No proper agreement for shipping policy
 Lack of Privacy policy
 Feeble Site development and maintenance
 Less marketing or promote
 Business and enterprise less interested to move.

E-Commerce Challenges and Solutions

Abstract – The explosion of e-commerce businesses

has seen the growth of number of the online
businesses worldwide. Consumers nowadays are
opted with online business commerce which is
considerably convenience compared to traditional
transactions. Deniably, e-commerce enterprises
offer more benefits, comparing to “bricks-and-
mortal” traditional enterprises, but not to be
missed the issues and challenges faced by the e-
commerce enterprises. This study highlighted the
issues and challenges of e-commerce and a set of
proposed solutions to those issues and challenges.
Among the issues are trust, readiness and security.
For each of the issues and challenges, proposed
solutions are presented

LITERATURE REVIEW
Researchers have defined e-commerce in
many versions. Using the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
version, e-commerce can be defined as [3]:

“The sale or purchase of goods or services,

conducted over computer networks by
methods specifically designed for the
purpose of receiving or placing of orders.
The goods or services are ordered by those
methods, but the payment and the ultimate
delivery of the goods or services do not have
to be conducted online. An e-commerce
transaction can be between enterprises,
households, individuals, government, and
other public or private organizations. To be
included are orders made over the web,
extranet or electronic data interchange. The
type is defined by the method of placing the
order. To be excluded are orders made by
telephone calls, facsimile or manually typed
e-mail.”

CHALLENGES
CHALLENGES

A. Trust
The trust between sellers and buyers plays an
important role for any successful e-commerce
transactions. Yoon and Occena [1] have found out
that trust is the fundamental problem in e-commerce
environment. Comparing to traditional commerce,
trust is more important in e-commerce because goods
and services purchased over the Internet cannot be
immediately verified and also because of the lack of
rules and regulation in e-commerce [1].

B. Readiness Level
Readiness level is another factor of the e-
commerce challenges. Kurnia et al. [4] presented a
framework consisting three levels of readiness which
are Organizational Readiness (OR), Industry
Readiness (IR) and National Readiness (NR).

1) Organizational readiness level

Kurnia et al. [4] defined this first level of
readiness in the context of perceived benefits (PB)
and perceived organization resources and governance
(PORaG). PB is used to explain how a certain
technology is perceived to be advantageous to an
organization. In this context, PB takes into
consideration, the costs, risks, threats, opportunities
and compatibility of the innovation with the existing
processes, culture, existing requirements and
infrastructure. Meanwhile, PORaG is referring to
organizational perceptions of the resources
availability which including financial, technology
and human resources [4].

2) Industry readiness level

Industry readiness denotes the readiness in
nurturing e-commerce technology adoption, given the
fact that small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
having fewer influence and power comparing to
larger organizations [4].

3) National readiness level

This level is referring to the availability of
services in a country that support the adoption of e-
commerce technologies.
 SOLUTIONS
Trust Solutions
Noor et al. proposed a trust framework for
social commerce which consisting of Usefulness,
Ease of Use, Security, Privacy, Website Design and
E-word of mouth.
 The study that focuses on S-
commerce which is also applicable for E-commerce
since it’s a subset of E-commerce.
According to the researchers, usefulness is the
degree to which user recognizes the commerce site to
be beneficial and the user’s decision and perception
to the business transaction are affected by this factor
 The next factor that influences the online trust is
ease of use.
 Yoon and Occena [1] stated that a notable
attempt must be made to improve the website quality
and enhance the third-party recognition (TPR).
Using gender and age as the control variables, their
research is to investigate the trust in C2C e-
commerce.
 Younger generations are affected by the
quality of an e-commerce website that influence them
to become real online purchasers [1].

 Lack of education
 LITERATURE REVIEW
Trust in E-Commerce A key reason for people’s lack of willingness to provide information or shop online
is “the fundamental lack of faith (or trust) between most businesses and consumers on the Web”
(Hoffman, Novak, and Peralta, 1999, p. 80). In other words, trust is necessary for ‘online relationship
exchanges’ involving personal and financial information which take place in a virtual environment
characterized by uncertainty, lack of control, and potential opportunism (Hoffman et al., 1999;
Bhattacherjee, 2002). Keen (1997) argues that the lack of consumer trust is the most significant long-
term barrier for e-commerce. Similarly, as echoed by Bhattacherjee (2002) based on the opinions of
several other e-commerce researchers, “lack of trust may eventually pose a substantial threat to the
successful conduct of electronic commerce” (p. 212). Hence, a key question for e-commerce success
from a human-computer interaction perspective is (Rosenbloom, 2000): How can e-commerce
technology be engineered to inspire consumer trust? To answer this question, it is necessary to first
understand the concept of consumer trust in the online environment. Although trust has been
recognized as a key facilitator (or inhibitor) of electronic commerce, many aspects concerning online
trust and its antecedents and consequences are still not well understood (Bhattacherjee, 2002). Some of
the related questions include: What are the elements that constitute both initial and ongoing trust in e-
commerce? What are the antecedents, or factors influencing (initial and ongoing) trust in e-commerce?
What are the design characteristics that constitute a trustworthy e-commerce Web site? Does
propensity to trust differ among people of different demographics, such as age groups, gender, and
educational qualifications? What are the mechanisms for initiating, building, and sustaining trust in e-
commerce? How effective are the existing mechanisms for developing online trust? To what degree and
in what ways is trust accountable for the success or failure of an ecommerce Web site? In the following
sub-sections, we will review the concept of consumer trust in e-commerce, its antecedents and
consequences, and mechanisms and design issues for trust development in e-commerce. Note that we
focus only on consumer-related trust, that is, trust in business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-
consumer (C2C) e-commerce. Based on the review, we offer some recommendations concerning
development of e-commerce Web sites, and highlight some key research issues concerning trust in e-
commerce. 4.1 Concept of Trust in E-commerce – its Components, Antecedents and Consequences Trust
is a complex, multi-dimensional, context-dependent construct (Gefen, 2000; McKnight, Choudhury, and
Kacmar, 2002). According to Friedman, Kahn, and Howe (2000), we trust “when we are vulnerable to
harm from others yet believe these others would not harm us even though they could” (p. 34). In the
context of e-commerce, consumer trust can be defined as the willingness of the consumer (trustor) to
be vulnerable to the actions of an online party (trustee) by engaging in online relationship exchanges
with the party. By providing sensitive information to the online party as part of the exchanges, the
consumer, who has limited ability to monitor or control the behavior of the online party, becomes
vulnerable to the actions of the party. By becoming vulnerable, the consumer is taking a risk in the
relationship. Hence, “trust is not taking risk per se, but rather it is a willingness to take risk” (Mayer,
Davis, and Schoorman, 1995, p. 712). Consumers’ lack of trust in the online environment is
demonstrated by their fear of giving away personal and financial information because of privacy
concerns arising from lack of environmental control and control over secondary use of information
(Hoffman et al., 1999). Environmental control refers to the consumer’s ability to control the actions of a
Web vendor as well as the Web provider’s ability to prevent the information from being hacked,
whereas control over secondary use of information refers to the ability to control one’s personal
information from being used for other purposes after the transaction has taken place. According to
Hoffman et al.’s (1999) analysis, 63% of consumers decline to provide personal information to Web sites
because they do not trust those collecting the data, 69% of those who refuse to provide such
information do so because the Web sites provide no information on how the data will be used, and 65%
indicate that it is not worth the risk. Almost 95% of Web users have declined to provide personal
information to Web sites at one time or another when asked (Hoffman et al., 1999). The
conceptualization of trust in e-commerce has been advanced by two recent efforts undertaken by
Bhattacherjee (2002) and McKnight et al. (2002) where measures for the construct were developed.
McKnight et al. conceptualized trust in e-commerce as comprising four aspects: disposition to trust (i.e.,
general willingness to trust others), institution-based trust (i.e., perceptions of the Internet
environment), trusting beliefs (i.e., perceptions of Web vendor attributes), and trusting intentions (i.e.,
intentions to engage in trust-related behaviors with a Web vendor), whereas Bhattacherjee specifically
addressed individual trust in online firms (or ‘trusting beliefs’ in McKnight et al.’s term) by developing a
seven-item scale for the construct. In both studies, the concept of trusting beliefs is operationalized
based on the dimensions proposed by Mayer et al. (1995): ability (competence), integrity (reliability and
dependability), and benevolence (care and goodwill) of the trustee (or the online firm or party in the
Nah & Davis: HCI Research Issues in Electronic Commerce Page 106 context of e-commerce). Despite
these two recent advancements in conceptualizing and operationalizing the trust construct in the e-
commerce environment, the concept of ongoing or long-term trust in e-commerce is still not well
understood or studied. McAllister (1995) distinguishes between two types of trust: cognition-based trust
and affect-based trust. In the context of e-commerce, cognition-based trust refers to reliability and
dependability of the trustee, which corresponds to ‘integrity’ in Mayer et al.’s term. Affect-based trust
refers to care and concern for the other party, or ‘benevolence’ in Mayer et al.’s term. Similarly, these
two types of trust were also proposed by Doney and Cannon (1997) but termed credibility (cognition-
based) versus benevolence (affect-based) by them. From the literature, it is clear that ability or
competence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for trust. To engage in a trusting online
relationship, a consumer is likely to first evaluate the competence and integrity of the online firm or
party. Hence, cognition-based trust is crucial in establishing an initial relationship with an online party.
On the other hand, as indicated by Mayer et al. (1995), the effect of perceived benevolence on trust is
likely to increase over time as the relationship develops. Hence, affect-based trust is expected to
become more important in subsequent online relationships. Although the literature suggests differences
between the types of trust needed to establish an initial versus ongoing relationship, we are not aware
of research studies that have empirically investigated, assessed or validated the differences between
initial and ongoing trust in online exchange relationships.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The literature on trust crosses a wide variety of disciplines. While customer trust has been studied
extensively by marketing and management researchers and psychologists, it has also become relevant
to researchers and marketers who study web-based commerce. The open nature of the Internet as a
transaction infrastructure and its global constitution has made trust a crucial element of e-commerce
(Hoffman et al., 1999). Research on the concept of trust in the online environment, starting from the
late 1990s has generated a compelling list of attributes that endangers consumers trust on e-commerce
(Appendix A). The commonly cited study by Hoffman et al. (1999) focus on security and privacy as the
key drivers of online trust. They argue that environmental control or consumer’s ability to control the
actions of a web vendor directly affects consumer perception of online security and privacy. They also
discuss the effectiveness of third-party trust-certification bodies (e.g. TRUSTe or Verisign) and the public
key encryption infrastructure for ensuring transactional security (including privacy protection) as central
success factors for building consumer trust in Internet. Many other scholars have reinforced this belief
asserting that only after security and privacy have been addressed will consumer consider other web
features (i.e. ease of navigation, familiarity, reputation) to determine the extant to which they can trust
and feel safe transacting with the web merchant (Dayal et al., 1999).