Term | Definition |
Advertising revenue model | the most widely used revenue model in e-commerce, and arguably, without advertising revenues, the web would be a vastly different experience from what it is now. |
affiliate revenue model | an e-commerce revenue model in which web sites are paid as "affiliates" for sending their visitors to other sites in return for a referral fee. |
behavioral marketing (targeting) | tracking the click-streams (history of clicking behavior) of individuals across multiple web sites for the purpose of understanding their interests and intentions, and exposing them to advertisements which are uniquely suited to their interests. |
business to business (B2B( electronic commerce | electronic sales of goods and services among businesses. |
business to consumer (B2C) electronic commerce | electronic retailing of products and services directly to individual consumers. |
co location | a kind of web site hosting in which firm purchase or rent a physical server computer at a hosting company's location in order to operate a web site. |
community providers | a web site business model that creates a digital online environment where people with similar interests can transact (by and sell goods); share interests, photos, videos; communicate with like-minded people; receive interest-related information; |
consumer to consumer (C2C) electronic commerce | electronic commerce consumers selling goods and services electronically to other consumers. |
cost transparency | the ability of of consumers to discover the actual costs merchants pay for products. |
crowdsourcing | using large internet audiences for advice, market feedback, new ideas and solutions to business problems. related to the 'wisdom of crowds' theory. |
customization | the modification of a software package to meet an organization's unique requirements without destroying the package software's integrity |
digital goods | goods that can be delivered over a digital network. |
disintermediation | the removal of organizations or business process layers responsible for certain intermediary steps in a value chain. |
dynamic pricing | pricing of items based on real-time interactions between buyers and sellers that determine what a item is worth at any particular moment. |
electronic data interchange (EDI) | the direct computer to computer exchange between two organizations of standard business transactions, such as orders, shipment instructions, or payments. |
E-tailer | online retail stores from the giant amazon to tiny local stores that have web sites where retail goods are sold. |
exchanges | third-party net marketplaces that are primarily transaction oriented and that connects many buyers and suppliers for spot purchasing. |
free/freemium revenue model | an e-commerce revenue model in which a firm offers basic services or content for free, while charging a premium for advanced or high value features. |
information asymmetry | situation where the relative bargaining power of two parties in a transaction is determined by one party in the transaction possessing more information essential to the transaction than the other party. |
information desity | the total amount and quality of information available to all market participants, consumers, and merchants. |
intellectual property | intangible property created by individuals or corporations that is subject to protections under trade secret, copyright, and patent law. |
long tail marketing | refers to the ability of firms to profiably market goods to very small online audiences, largely because of the lower costs of reaching very small market segments (people who fall into the long tail ends of a bell curve). |
market creator | an e-commerce business model in which firms provide a digital online environment where buyers and sellers can meet, search for products, and engage in transactions. |
market entry costs | the cost merchants must pay simply to bring theirs goods to market. |
marketspace | a marketplace extended beyond traditional boundaries and removed from a temporal and geographic location. |
menu costs | merchants' costs of changing prices. |
micro-payment system | payment for a very small sum of money, often less than $10. |
mobile commerce (m-commerce) | the use of wireless devices, such as cell phones or handheld digital information appliances, to conduct both business to consumer and business to business e-commerce transactions over the internet. |
net marketplaces | digital marketplaces based on internet technology linking many buyers to many sellers. |
personalization | ability of merchants to target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a persons name, interests, and past purchases |
podcasting | method of publishing audio broadcasts via the internet, allowing subscribing users to download audio files onto their personal computers or portable music players. |
prediction market | an analysis of the portfolio of potential applications within a firm to determine the risks and benefits, and to select among alternatives for information systems. |
price discrimination | selling the same goods, or nearly the same goods, to different targeted groups at different prices. |
price transparency | the ease with which consumers can find out the variety of prices in a market. |
private excahnge | another term for a private industrial network. |
private industrial networks | web-enabled networks linking systems of multiple firms in an industry for the coordination of trans-organizational business processes. |
revenue model | a description of how a firm will earn revenue, generate profits, and produce a return on investment. |
richness | measurement of the depth and detail of information that a business can supply to the customer as well as information the business collects about the customer. |
sales revenue model | companies derive revenue by selling goods, information, or services to customers. |
search costs | the time and money spent locating a suitable product and determining the best price for that product. |
social graph | map of all significant online social relationships, comparable to a social network describing offline relationships. |
social shopping | use of web sites featuring user-created web pages to share knowledge about items of interest to other shoppers. |
streaming | is a publishing method for music and video files that flows a continuous stream of content to a user's device without being stored locally on the device. |
subscription revenue model | a web site offering content or services charges a subscription fee for access to some or all of its offering son an ongoing basis |
transaction costs | the costs of participating in a market. |
transaction fee revenue model | an online e-commerce revenue model where the firm receives a fee for enabling or executing transactions. |
wisdom of crowds | the belief that large numbers of people can make better decisions about a wide range of topics or products than a single person or even a small committee of experts (first proposed in a book by James Surowiecki) |