582402 Electronic Commerce and Internet, group exercise

The Groups

The exercise is done in groups of 4-6.

Task Description

The purpose of the exercise is to ponder the implementation of electronic commerce from the point of view of one sample company.

Reporting

The planning results will be presented as a set of web pages. The report should be finished by Monday, October 23rd, after which date the groups will present their plans at the two final exercise sessions (weeks 43 and 44). The report should explore the following issues, when applicable.

1. The Business Idea

- Products and services - Who are the potential customers? - What comprises the company's income? Who pays and for what? - Co-operation, networking with other companies, decentralizing operations etc. - Business risks (strengths, weaknesses, threats, possibilities) - Marketing, custom maintenance, creating an image, stories etc - the relations to the company's other (non-electronic) business activities

2. Implementation

- The implementation architecture; which components are needed, how do they work together, communications etc. - The interface to the rest of the world - Which parts may be ready-bought, what may be used after customizing, what must the company make itself? Can some services be bought from outside the company? - Data management; which data, what queries are made, etc. - User interface and usability (an outline of the user interface on HTML) - Sample implementations - Scalability; volume, speed, distribution, multilinguality ... - The demands set on the customers' user environment (e.g. browser versions, line speeds)

3. Maintenance, Function

- What amount of user resources (man/machine) is needed for the market place to work? - How often are changes to be expected and what are they like?

4. Legal and Ethical Questions

5. Safety Risks and How to Manage Them

Group Exercise Tasks

Let Juha Makkonen know the names of your group members and the URL of the web pages as soon as you have it!

1. Interflora florists
2. Marketing of electronic components
3. Bookshop selling digital books and other digital product
4. The fan club of a film star, a sports star, etc.
5. The member club of a mobile phone brand
6. The pages of an architects' or other planning office
7. A Web doctor's clinic
8. A centre for distance education
9. Muench Mammut 2000 motor bikes
10. Home-delivery of groceries
11. The Internet section of a big media conglomerate (newspapers, magazines,
TV and radio stations etc)
12. Web pages of an international non-profit organisation (an international
aid, environment or other organisation)
13. Web pages of a chain of stores (like K-kaupat, Sokos)
14. A travelling agent's arranging adventure trips

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Helsingissä, 21.9. 2000
Lea Kutvonen, Helena Ahonen-Myka, Marina Kurten