The MSNBC article had a blaring headline, "One in every 20 consumers has been the victim of credit card fraud in the past 12 months and one 1 in 50 has been the victim of identity theft." Actually, it was 5.2 percent of every 1000 online adults in the United States were victims of the fraud and 1.9 percent of the people were victims of identity theft---but that’s nitpicking the numbers. Importantly, the victims of identity theft didn’t know if their identity was stolen online or offline. Either way, it is scary to know that online thieves stole more than $700 million dollars. This loss of 1.14 percent of total online sales means that online fraud was 19 times the dollar numbers of offline fraud. This finding was done by a recent survey by Gartner Inc.
ClearCommerce Corporation, a provider of payment processing and fraud protection software for e-commerce, studied 1,100 of its best online merchants to get a better understanding of online fraud. In doing so, they analyzed 6 million transactions from 40,000 customers who were collectively doing business with the company’s merchants.
Although last year’s global recession hurt many sectors of the business world, e-commerce was an area that that ended really well. Buyers around the world spent more than $600 billion dollars last year. This figure was a huge 68 percent increase from the previous year (2000). [International Data Corp (IDC)].
US Online Retail Sales
Historically, the fourth quarter of every year has largest number of online sales. This is usually due to the holiday season. Although, the September 11th attack initially affected online sales, the fourth quarter of last year came back stronger than ever. Here is a breakdown of online sales as estimated by the Department of Commerce for the last two years:
Most countries have top-level domain names which end with their countries’ designated suffix, such as .ca(Canada), .uk(United Kingdom), etc. Finally, after many years of prodding, the U.S. government will allow individuals to register their own .us domain name. On Monday March 4th, 2002, the U.S. government will allow companies to register their trademark name with a .us suffix. After April 9th, anyone can register their name. The 35 registrars who have signed-up to sell the .us TLDs can do so to anyone who has a business in the United States or does business here. The U.S. Commerce Department selected the Washington D.C. company, NeuStar, to operate the name last year. NeuStar also works with the Australian company NeuLevel to operate the .biz TLD. Neustar will charge the 35 registrars US $35 per name and the registrars will charge us somewhere between $15-$30. Although 100,000 names have already been issued, they are mostly owned by state and local government agencies. When .us was first released, it wasn’t very popular because the name looked like software.lex.ky.us. However, now Neustar says that they will allow people to register their names which look like software.us. What a change! Lastly, Neustar promises that they can register and have your domain name operational in less than 15 minutes.
In the middle of last year (June 2001), Amazon.com made headlines by announcing that they were going to offer free shipping and handling for any purchases over $99. Is this a trend for the future? Maybe...but only for the rich.
While Amazon's offer brought millions of dollars worth of publicity to the company, not too many of us regular ecommerce website owners can afford to offer free shipping and handling. The latest issue of eMarketer's "eCommerce: B2C & Demographics" emphatically states that shipping and handling is a "sizable" business expense. The online metrics company, Jupiter, stated that 45% of ecommerce website owners loose money on shipping and handling.
Since the introduction of magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) technology in the mid-1950s, businesses and consumers alike increasingly have chosen to pay bills by check. In 1999, 70 billion checks were written in the United States, accounting for 73 percent of all non-cash transactions. Of the total, 56 percent, or 39.2 billion, were written by consumers. Businesses wrote 28.7 billion, or 41 percent and government, 2.1 billion, or three percent. The United States Postal service earned 25 percent of its year's revenues from the delivery of checks. (Hence, the phrase: "The check is in the mail.") Banks generated $60 billion in revenues from checking accounts, according to the Check Payment Systems Association.
A fairly common question I receive relates to adding ads to your site in order to generate revenue. How many visitors do you need, where do you get the ads and how much does it pay? The good news is that you can get ads for your site if you have as few as 5000 visitors (or less) a month. The bad news is that it will hardly pay anything. I suspect that many new Internet entrepreneurs are hoping to make the majority of their income from advertising. Although it is possible I feel that for most on-line business it is an unrealistic expectation. In order to generate a significant amount of income from advertising you will need to attract 10 to 100 times the amount of traffic to your site than a company that is selling a product or service. What do you have to offer that will do that (besides sex)? If the content you are offering is cheap or easily acquired (such as sex), then a lot of other sites will also be offering it.
The Internet has finally evolved as an essential marketing tool. The latest figures estimate that 50% of American households have a computer. Most businesses use the Internet for some business related function. B2B marketing (business to business), CRM (customer relation management) and SCM (supply chain management) are the key areas of business related growth on the Internet.
Dot Net is Microsoft's plan for the next-generation Internet and Web strategy. It is not a new operating system like Windows2000, but rather a new infrastructure in which web and other database servers communicate with each other using various software to fulfill Web-based services.
What is .Net
Mr. Robert Hess, Group Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, said during an interview exploring how Web services can be used in a company's strategy:
How is the casual web surfer going to perceive your website as distinct from a thousand others in the same business?
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