Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is defined as using the Internet and other communication technologies for the marketing, selling and servicing of products and services. E-commerce can be categorised into two types: Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to- Consumer (B2C). B2B e-commerce typically relates to transactions between or among firms while B2C e-commerce generally refers to transactions between firms and consumers. Aspects of both types of ecommerce include informing a customer of a product’s existence, providing in-depth product information, establishing the customer’s requirements, performing purchase transactions, delivering information goods electronically, providing customer service electronically, and managing customer relationships online.

Historical Perspective

Research on B2B e-commerce has generally focused on encouraging the adoption and deployment of eecommerce technologies by organisations. In these studies, external factors such as institutional pressures and competitive pressures, and organisational factors such as absorptive capacity and organisational learning capacity are considered to play an important role in the adoption and deployment of e-commerce technologies by organisations.

Research on B2C e-commerce has identified trust and interactive features as key elements that attract consumers to visit and carry out transactions with the web storefront. Arising from these studies, some useful trust building and interactive mechanisms have been proposed to attract and convert customers from browsers to buyers.

As e-commerce matures, researchers at the School of Computing have begun to focus on understanding the impact of electronic market institutions and new technologies on consumer decision-making and behaviour.

Impact of Electronic Market Institutions

Several new market institutions have emerged and become popular with consumers. They are buy-out auctions, reverse auctions, agent-assisted commerce and others. While these institutions have attracted a great deal of attention from the popular press, there are few empirical research studies examining their impact on seller and buyer behaviour. In our programme, we examine the effects of several major institutions, including agent-assisted commerce, auction and group-buying on consumer decision-making and behaviour.

Agent-assisted commerce: Through several rigorous sets of experimental studies, we show that comparisonshopping agents could help improve consumer decision accuracy without incurring additional effort in the presence of high information load (i.e., choosing products with many relevant attributes). When consumers are presented with personalised information, they are more likely to exert more effort and more able to make better decisions. At the same time, they tend to pay less attention to advertisements, but will have more clickthroughs on the advertisements that they do pay attention to. These findings provide useful inputs for agent design, implementation and usage.

Auction: The buyout option allows a bidder to acquire an auctioned product immediately at a posted price without going through the hassle of monitoring the auction process and submitting bids for it. Through two studies, we demonstrate that a bidder is more likely to be loss averse and has a higher propensity to buy out in the presence of the permanent buyout option (i.e., option is available until the end of the auction or when a bidder chooses to buy out). However, when facing temporary buyout options (i.e., options that are not available throughout an auction), a bidder would prevent other bidders from ending the auction prematurely by attempting to “remove” the buyout option. These findings allow sellers to choose the appropriate type of buy-out options to suit their needs.

Group-buying: Group-buying websites seek to aggregate the demands of buyers’ with the purpose of obtaining quantity-discounts from sellers. We empirically assessed two artefacts – conditional purchase and information cue – for their effects on decisional choice. The conditional purchase artefact allows a buyer not to honour the purchase when the expected discount price is not met while the information cue artefact provides information about the procurement actions of the other buyers. Our results suggest that buyers presented with conditional purchase options are more willing to make a purchase choice, i.e., deviate from inertia. As for the provision of information cues, it appears to induce inaction generally. However, when a choice has to be made between a risky choice and one that is less risky, the presence of information cues leads to a higher propensity to opt for the riskier choice. These findings provide some useful advice on what features to include in group-buying websites.

The faculty members involved in electronic commerce are:

• CHAN Hock Chuan
• GOH Khim Yong
• JIANG Zhenhui, Jack    
• KIM Hee Woong          
• TAN Cheng Yian, Bernard
• TEO Hock Hai           
• XU Yunjie