Electronic Commerce and Change in Management Accounting Practices in an Egyptian Organization

The objective of this chapter is to explore the implementation of e-commerce in an Egyptian organization. It reports on a longitudinal case study in an Egyptian organization (TexCo) that implemented Business-to-Business (B-to-B) electronic commerce. Following a change in leadership, TexCo was subject to a process of questioning the traditional ways of doing things. This process resulted in realizing planning, decision-making, and control problems within the company. The B-to-B system was chosen to introduce new control-based rules. However, the change was faced with resistance from TexCo's distributors. It is posited that various power strategies were used to ameliorate covert and overt resistance. Over time, the management accounting practices in TexCo changed towards greater decision support and control. B-to-B electronic commerce improved planning, decision-making, and control in TexCo.

An Investigation into the Factors Affecting E-Commerce Adoption Decisions by SMEs

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has become an increasingly important initiative among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as both a great opportunity and as a source of competition. The factors affecting adoption decisions of e-commerce by SMEs have been well documented, but there is a paucity of empirical studies that examine the adoption of e-commerce in the Arab world. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into the salient e-commerce adoption issues by focusing on Saudi Arabian businesses. This chapter investigates the state of e-commerce adoption and analyses the factors that determine the extent to which SMEs in Saudi Arabia are inclined towards deploying e-commerce technologies. This research was designed using a qualitative approach through exploratory case studies selected from firms in Saudi Arabia. The findings contribute towards a better conceptual and practical understanding of the main factors driving SMEs to adopt e-commerce. The study has found that the level of e-commerce implementation has yet to mature and customer readiness for Internet shopping has to improve before e-commerce reaches the levels of maturity seen in other regions of the world. This study highlights several directions for future inquiry and implications for policymakers and managers who are involved in efforts to introduce complex innovations such as e-commerce into their organisations or are interested in expanding their e-commerce applications and generating more revenue.

The Relationship between Online Reviews, Brand Trust, and Willingness to Buy

This chapter investigates how online customer reviews affect consumer decision-making (willingness to buy) during their first purchase of services or products using brand trust as a mediating variable. A brief literature review, rationale and significance, and methodology are discussed, and a conceptual framework based on the relationships between the stated variables is adopted in this empirical study to demonstrate linkages and insights. The findings demonstrate that the “reliability dimension” of brand trust had a mediating effect on online customer reviews' valence to willingness to buy, while the “intentionality dimension” of brand trust had little effect. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that online customer reviews generated by in-group and out-group reviewers have little effect on purchasing decisions (willingness to buy). These results suggest that marketers should focus more on managing negative online customer reviews that have a damaging effect on brand trust.

Evaluation of B2B Pharmaceutical Supply Chain in Australia

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most innovative and research-intensive industries in the world. For example, five out of the top global Research and Development (R&D) companies were pharmaceutical companies. However, the industry is lagging behind other industries in adopting Business-to-Business (B2B) and supply chain technologies. With supply chain costs constituting around 25-40% of an organization's operating expenses, it is imperative for senior pharmaceutical executives to minimize this cost. Hence, the main objective of this chapter is to identify key B2B e-commerce management, evaluation, and benefits realization factors and challenges within the Australian pharmaceutical supply chain. The results of this study suggest that pharmaceutical companies not only need to carefully examine their B2B investment management and evaluation practices but also must invest in using appropriate evaluation methodologies for identifying and managing benefits, risks, and costs associated with their investments in B2B and supply chains.

Branding Cultural Analogues in Virtual Communities

This chapter discusses cultures as analogues of actual environments, specifically socially constructed communities and the individuals who compose them. Analogues replace actual environments in human perception. Virtual communities provide context for this discussion. Virtual communities have evolved as analogues of actual communities to the degree that technology permits. Greater technological detail brings greater detail in the production of analogues. As a fundamentally cultural phenomenon, marketing communication signifies shared patterns of consumer thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors. Virtual communities are particularly suited to communicate consumer culture because they afford consumers authentic cultural presence through analogous representations. Culture depends on communication. Communication depends upon symbols. Symbols constitute electronic environments. Brands are symbols. eBranding supplies consumers with components to construct identities by communicating consumer roles and relationships in virtual consumer culture environments for transfer to actual consumer culture environments. Consumption in actual environments results in brand viability and marketing success.

Semantic++ Electronic Commerce Architecture and Models in Cloud

Electronic commerce is playing a more and more important role in today's commercial activities. In this chapter, the authors propose a kind of new electronic commerce architecture in the cloud and give two kinds of new electronic commerce models. This chapter opens the discussion of why we need to design a new architecture in the cloud environment. Firstly, the authors have a discussion about the semantic++ computing. After the discussion, they give the architecture that can satisfy the requirements in the cloud. This architecture mainly includes five technologies, which are the massive EC data storage technology in the cloud, the massive EC data processing technology in the cloud, the EC security management technology in the cloud, OLAP technology for EC in the cloud, and active EC technology in the cloud. Then, the authors propose two kinds of semantic++ electronic commerce models based on big data. These two models are the new electronic commerce models. The first model is semantic++ electronic commerce Q/A (Questions/Answers) model and another is the active semantic++ electronic commerce model. These two models are all based on big data. Finally, the authors conclude this chapter and give future work.

Purchase-Based Targeted Advertising

Purchase-Based Targeted Advertising (PBTA) refers to the advertising that is targeted to an individual based on his or her purchase histories, which is ubiquitous in the age of e-commerce. This chapter examines the competitive effects of PBTA by establishing a two-period duopoly model: the first period consists of the consumer information gathering process while the second is the period where PBTA is embraced. Based on this model, it is found that PBTA may improve or damage industry profits, consumer surplus, as well as social welfare. The conditions under which the competitive effect is positive or negative are derived, showing that whether PBTA is beneficial or detrimental depends on the content of advertising designed by the competing firms. It is suggested that firms under competitive environments cautiously deploy PBTA with appropriate advertising contents.

Digital Marketing Optimization

Digital marketing is a proliferating field that has opened new challenges for marketers. These challenges address concepts of website navigation, searchability, and garnering online traffic –issues that are critical to any organization's online presence. This chapter identifies website characteristics, studies the role they perform in the context of an organization's virtual presence, and proposes the creation of a framework that aids organizations in optimizing their digital marketing strategies for better return on investment.

A General Evolution Mechanism Model for E-Commerce Network

In order to investigate the general formation of e-commerce market network, this chapter describes an analytical framework and builds an innovative model for explaining the evolutionary process, with several original factors—growth factor, select-order factor, preferential attachment mechanism, and global-local factor. The research reveals that the attraction mechanism impacts evolutionary trend and network structure to some extent, and also reveals that the global-local factor and select-order factor impact the evolutionary structure of the network: the smaller the probability, the smaller the concentration of networks and the more obvious the randomness is.

Predicting Low-Carbon Travel Behavior

The activities of the tourism industry and tourists cause many of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. To reduce carbon emissions resulted from travel, low-carbon tourism has becoming an urgent issue. Little research has paid attention to low-carbon travel behavior of tourists, and their influence factors are still unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to establish a modified Theory of Planned Behavior model to predict which factors may impact low-carbon travel behaviors. In this study, an effective sample of 387 Taiwanese was collected in the first “ECO Taiwan Expo.” Through a rigorous structural equation modeling process, the results show that the respondents are independently involved in low-carbon tourism, rather than influenced by significant others or groups. In addition, past travel experiences could improve travelers' perceived behavioral control and behavioral intention toward low-carbon travel behavior. Finally, the moderating effect of perceived behavioral control is evidenced between behavioral intention and preferred behavior in this study.