Introduction:

There are two different ways to approach teaching e-commerce. One is focus strategies, business models and basic concepts such as cryptography and payment systems and disucuss how to build a site. The other is to focus on building a small site and then briefly discuss the business models and basic concepts. This course mostly takes the second approach. Last week, you built web pages and exposed them to the entire world.

The purpose of this discussion is to allow you to explore some business and technical issues that we might miss because we are focusing on actual development of a site. I have selected two text books that could be used in teaching an e-commerce course and made the Tables of Contents available to you in links in each of this weeks two discussions.

 

W2D1: Designing Systems for Internet Commerce

Review the Table of Contents for this text book. Find a topic that interests you and that you think you would like to discuss in this course. Try to avoid picking a topic that has already been chosen by someone else. This will make the discussion more interesting for the group.

Briefly research the topic on the internet and give us a brief overview of the topic. Then tell us why you think it is (or is not) important for businesses that want to conduct e-commerce. Finally, tell us if you think we should spend future class time on this topic. It is OK to say something like "Based on my research on XML (or whatever topic you picked), I don't think I need to learn more about it in an introductory e-commerce course".

Based on your postings, I may change the reading and lectures in future weeks.

 

W2D2: Creating Stores on the Web

Review the Table of Contents for this text book. Find a topic that interests you and that you think you would like to discuss in this course. Try to avoid picking a topic that has already been chosen by someone else. This will make the discussion more interesting for the group.

Briefly research the topic on the internet and give us a brief overview of the topic. Then tell us why you think it is (or is not) important for businesses that want to conduct e-commerce. Finally, tell us if you think we should spend future class time on this topic. It is OK to say something like "Based on my research on XML (or whatever topic you picked), I don't think I need to learn more about it in an introductory e-commerce course".

Based on your postings, I may change the reading and lectures in future weeks.