A
corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.
An internal blog, generally accessed through the corporation's Intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. Many blogs are also communal, allowing anyone to post to them. The informal nature of blogs may encourage:
-employee participation
-free discussion of issues
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collective intelligence-direct communication between various layers of an organization
-a sense of community
Internal blogs may be used in lieu of meetings and e-mail discussions, and can be especially useful when the people involved are in different locations, or have conflicting schedules. Blogs may also allow individuals who otherwise would not have been aware of or invited to participate in a discussion to contribute their expertise.
An external blog is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they're posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts. External corporate blogs, by their very nature, are biased, though they can also offer a more honest and direct view than traditional communication channels. Nevertheless, they remain public relations tools. Certain corporate blogs have a very high number of subscribers. The official Google Blog is currently in the Technorati top 50 listing among all blogs worldwide. Marketers might expect to have product evangelists or influencers among the audience of an external blog. Once they find them, they may treat them like VIPs, asking them for feedback on exclusive previews, product testing, marketing plans, customer services audits, etc. The business blog can provide additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.
One of the famous e-commerce website in Malaysia is AirAsia Airline ( www.airasia.com ). Many people do not know that AirAsia was develop in Malaysia and is one of the public held companies. Airasia is one of the budget airline which focus on online ticket booking rather than having counter selling ticket in airport. Thus, it creates convenient for customer that can access to internet and also save up their cost to set up counter in airport. Let’s take a review on the feature of this website – www.airasia.com.my
TYPE OF PRODUCT
AirAsia is not only offering flight line for customer in one-way and return through online. The website also allowed customer find out Flight + Hotel which means customer can both booking for flight line and hotel together. This has brought a lot of convenience for people who plan for travel by comparing what time to go and return and what hotel to stay based on the rating, price and number of people. Besides, AirAsia also provide their superior services which is high accuracy on flight time. On the website, customer can easily select the place they depart and destination which they prefer to go. It cover a lot of country such as China, Indonesia, Australia, Brunei, Hong Kong and so on.
SITE DESIGN AND LAYOUT
In the left hand side is the place for customer to choose whether to book what type of ticket ( One-Way or Return) and choosing the depart and destination. It also allowed customers to choose what is the date to have flight. And AirAsia also have member system which enable customers to sign up and booking their ticket online to keep their privacy. The member system also can help to advertise by sending promotion in newsletter to customers. In the up site of the website is Navigation of the webpage. Middle part is the promotion current provided by AirAsia. Most of the color using by AirAsia is red color and it has become the represent of it’s image.
AVAILABLITY OF SEARCH ENGINE
AirAsia also having search engine in their website which is on the right up corner of webpage that bring convenient to customers to find out what they want to. Besides, another important search engine in AirAsia is search for the flight time and line when customer choose on the date and place of depart and destination. AirAsia will provided flight time to customer and the price on that time. On the other hand, speed of searching and downloading the website is very fast. It just take around 30 second to display the webpage.
NAVIGATION
The navigation available in the webpage as well which located on the upper site. It include convenience service which can bring customers to Bookings details, Flight Info, Product and Shipping, Travel Services, Corporate Services, About Us and Help Info. All of this details can bring customer to different webpage to satisfy customers need. For examples, checking out the flight info about where is the destination that AirAsia provide and check out the Help Info for FAQ (Frequently Ask Question). All of this are almost related to customer services. Customer can check out the payment system that provided by AirAsia so that customer can easily make booking through internet.
In conclusion, all of the feature that having for an e-commerce website is very important. First of all, must let customers know what product or services is available on the website. Second is having a well structured site layout that easily for customers to navigate and find out more information. Search engine is important for customer to compare the price.
Online auction has grown significantly every year that online shopping website has been available. As an example Ebay.com is one of the popular acution websites where users can get products for low price. But Before bidding for a product, both seller and buyers should consider some aspects. Fraud might be conducted by customer or by sellers. Some time consumers may send fake checks or fake account details to the sellers. But most of the fraud cases are conducted by sellers. According to the statistics of National Internet Fraud Watch Information centre, most of the internet frauds are based on online fraud, which consist of 45% of the total online frauds reported in year 2005.
In online auctions, buyers compete to grab desired products for low price. But before going to bid, we should consider that sellers play some tricks to lure the buyers.
I. Bid shielding: Bid shielding is one of the ways to mislead the real bidders. Fake bidders starts bidding with very high price and they drop from the bidding at last minute. The real bidder who bid for low price would win the bid and he needs to pay for it. All this is just to mislead the real buyer’s concentration to their products.
II. Shilling: In shilling, sellers arrange fake IDs and start bidding as buyers. The real bidders lure to the particular product and they bid it for little bit high amount than previous. In this way sellers get more benefit.
III. Hidden shipping costs and handling fee: Sellers hide the real shipping cost and handling fee. By the time buyers get the product, they might need to pay more than they expected.
IV. Failure to deliver: Sometimes buyer will never get the product even after he/she paid for it. This is an old type of cheating method.
V. Damage and loss claims: This type of frauds might be from buyer’s side. Buyer tries to claim new product or refund by reporting the seller that they never got products or they got damaged product. Sometimes seller cannot prove the delivery of product.
Below are some prevention methods for the e-auction fraud:
Escrow Services
Escrow Services are intended to ensure security by acting as a middle-man in transactions where the two parties do not trust each other. Rather than sending money or goods directly to the other party, the buyers send their money to the escrow service, which will holds them until the buyers receives the purchased item and then the escrow service will sends the money to the sellers. If either party fail to deliver their part of the deal, the money will be held at the escrow service and eventually returned to the buyer.
Insurance Policy
Which is the insurance service that offers by the auction websites in order to protect both buyers’ and sellers’ losses in the fraud case occur. For example, eBay offers insurance underwritten by Lloyd’s of London at no cost to eBay users.
Appraisal Service
Appraisers use a variety of methods to appraise items, including expert assessment of authenticity and condition and reviewing what comparable items have sold for in the marketplace in recent months. An appraised value is usually accurate at the time of appraisal but may change over time as an item becomes more or less popular in the marketplace.
Verification System
One way of confirming the identity and evaluating the condition of an item is through verification. With verification, neutral third parties will evaluate and identify an item through a variety of means. For example, some collectors have their item “DNA tagged” for identification purposes. This provides a way of tracking an item if it changes ownership in the future.
Feedback forum
Which is the feedback system allows registered buyers and sellers to build up their online trading reputations. It provides users with the ability to comment on their experiences with other individual
Reference:
http://www.ecommerce-digest.com/internet-fraud-report.html
http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/articles/beware_of_e_auctions
http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/internetschemes.htm
http://www.crimcheck.com/background-check-news/whats-internet-auction-fraud-and-how-do-i-prevent-it http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/260/267260/online_appendices/Turban-Appendix2A.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_escrow
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 by
Ivan
, under
Week 6
I had reviewed a post from My E-Commerce blog recently. From the blog, I found that Malaysian Government are trying set up new rules for those cybers cafe with a fixed business hours.
In the effort to implement these new rules to them, the government have to provides some new guidelines to be enforced soon to the company which operates cyber or internet cafe. There are a few guideline to do so which consists of :
1.Have to close by midnight daily.
2.Banned from using tinted glasses in their premises. (the interior must be able to see through from the outside)
3.Only allowed to operate from the ground floor.
4.Those under 12 years old must be accompanied by parents or guardian and only allowed to stay up to 10.00pm.
5.Prohibited from providing gaming activities, gambling, pornography, music and publications
with negative element.
6.Cigarettes and alcohol to be prohibited from being sold and also not to be sold to children
under 18 years old.
7.A book log to record the entry and departure time of the patrons.
The government implement these strategies are to prevent the cyber cafe turning into social ills which will affect the peoples behaviour and the safety of society. As my concern, many of the students or children will go to these cyber cafe to play games. Unfortunately, some of cafes just wanted to earn a positive income and just provides packages for the students. In the end, those student will not carry up their education as well and just keep staying at cyber cafe.
Without a fixed business hours, I wonder that how cyber cafe can be survive. In Malaysia, most of the cafes are operates at night or even till 24 hours. Eventhought is on 1
am, yet the cyber cafes are still full of peoples. Many of them wants to play online games or through LAN games. I guess if the government strongly practise them to operates on the time selected. Most of the cyber cafe will colapse or closed. But indirectly, some of them may still can be operates well because they may operates in the underground or given "protection" by the police.
