Deploying internet commerce in lottery businesses:an executive guideline

Commerce is essentially the exchange of goods and services in various forms between sellers and buyers, together with associated financial transactions. Electronic Commerce (EC) is the process of conducing commerce through electronic means, including any electronic commercial activity supported by IT (information technology) (Adam and Yesha, 1996; Kambil, 1997; Yen, 1998). In this sense, EC is not totally new. Industries have used various EC platforms such as advertising on TV and ordering by telephone or fax. Internet Commerce (IC), or Web Commerce, is a specific type of EC (Maddox, 1998; Minoli D. and Minoli E., 1997). While some traditional EC platforms such as TV and telephone have been used to build “TV-gambling” and “telephone-betting” systems for conducting lottery business, Internet Lottery Commerce (ILC) has been assessed as the most promising type of EC in the foreseeable future. There are many social and moral issues relating to the conduct of lottery business on-line. However, this chapter does not debate these but deals only with business and technology issues. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a structured guide to senior executives and strategic planners who are planning on, or interested in, ILC deployment and operation. The guide consists of several stages: (1) an explanation of the industry segment’s traits, value chain, and current status; (2) an analysis of the competition and business issues in the Internet era and an evaluation of the strategic resources; (3) a planning framework that addresses major infrastructure issues; and (4) recommendations comprising the construction of an ILC model, suggested principles, and an approach to strategic deployment. The chapter demonstrates the case for applying the proposed guideline within the lottery business. Faced with a quickly changing technological context, it pays special attention to constructing a conceptual framework that addresses the key components of an ILC model. ILC fulfils the major activities in a lottery commerce value chain—advertising, selling and delivering products, collecting payments for tickets, and paying prizes. Although the guideline has been devised for lottery businesses, it can be applied to many other industry sectors.

Adoption of electronic commerce tools in business procurement:enhanced buying center structure and processes

Modern procurement is being shifted from paper-based, people-intensive buying systems toward electronic-based purchase procedures that rely on Internet communications and Web-enhanced buying tools. Develops a typology of e-commerce tools that have come to characterize cutting-edge industrial procurement. E-commerce aspects of purchasing are organized into communication and transaction tools that encompass both internal and external buying activities. Further, a model of the impact of e-commerce on the structure and processes of an organization's buying center is developed. The impact of the changing buying center on procurement outcomes in terms of efficiency and effectiveness is also analyzed. Finally, implications for business-to-business marketers and researchers are discussed.

Connecting social media to e-commerce:cold-start product recommendation using microblogging information

In recent years, the boundaries between e-commerce and social networking have become increasingly blurred. Many e-commerce websites support the mechanism of social login where users can sign on the websites using their social network identities such as their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Users can also post their newly purchased products on microblogs with links to the e-commerce product web pages. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for cross-site cold-start product recommendation, which aims to recommend products from e-commerce websites to users at social networking sites in 'cold-start' situations, a problem which has rarely been explored before. A major challenge is how to leverage knowledge extracted from social networking sites for cross-site cold-start product recommendation. We propose to use the linked users across social networking sites and e-commerce websites (users who have social networking accounts and have made purchases on e-commerce websites) as a bridge to map users' social networking features to another feature representation for product recommendation. In specific, we propose learning both users' and products' feature representations (called user embeddings and product embeddings, respectively) from data collected from e-commerce websites using recurrent neural networks and then apply a modified gradient boosting trees method to transform users' social networking features into user embeddings. We then develop a feature-based matrix factorization approach which can leverage the learnt user embeddings for cold-start product recommendation. Experimental results on a large dataset constructed from the largest Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo and the largest Chinese B2C e-commerce website JingDong have shown the effectiveness of our proposed framework.