The Development of Key Performance Indicators for E-Commerce in Hotel Businesses Using Balanced Scorecard

 In the modern business world, the IT advances accelerate the world's commercial development with the help of Internet technology in supporting variety of activities. As a result, e-commerce plays a significant role in almost every industry. Hotel industry is one of those which are fully beneficial from the e-commerce, which fulfills the customer's needs. This research is conducted to study the character of the hotel e-commerce and the measurement of performance of the hotel e-commerce in Thailand in all perspectives of Balanced Scorecard. The researcher uses the reasoning approach to describe the relationship between the variables of causes and effects whose directions are precisely specified. The samples of the research are the hotels in the Bangkok metropolitans and vicinity areas. The researcher uses questionnaires to measure the customer satisfaction of business operations according to the Balanced Scorecard. Then, the initial collective information is analyzed to categorize those samples in percentage. Next, the result of the satisfaction based on  Balanced Scorecard measurement is tested for the relationship of all variables by using the statistic of interrelation and chi-square values.
The result of the research provides us the character of operating of the hotel industries and the sufficiency of operating e-commerce of hotel industries in Thailand. In addition, it can be used as guidelines in hotel business development which enhances the capabilities of performance and competition.

Assessing users' product-specific knowledge for personalization in electronic commerce

While many electronic commerce (EC) companies are adopting one-to-one marketing approaches using various personalization technologies to make their products and services unique for the purpose of attracting and retaining customers and improving their completion edges in the EC ecosystem, which, nevertheless, has low entrance barriers for new players to join and further intensify the competition, none or few of them consider a fundamental issue--the user's product-specific knowledge. Our research proposed to add this new domain of the customer's knowledge on appropriate target products into the personalization process as a part of the overall EC strategy for businesses. In this paper, we present our initial design for assessing the user's product-specific knowledge using the proposed innovative method for detecting it directly in a non-intrusive way without asking users to answer or fill out any types of questionnaires. Our method is based on customer's on-line navigation behaviors by analyzing their navigation patterns through pre-trained artificial neural networks. An empirical study designed for a case of EC store selling digital cameras was conducted in our research to prove the concept, and a good preliminary result was derived from the study. For the purpose of comparing the performances between the conventional approach of using questionnaire and the proposed innovative approach of navigation pattern mining, a questionnaire based approach for evaluating the user's product-specific knowledge was designed and incorporated into our knowledge level assessment system (KLAS). Our study result shows that although the pure questionnaire-based KLAS is intrusive and may not be accepted by some users, for those users willing to complete the questionnaire, the proposed navigation pattern approach can be combined with the questionnaire-based approach to create a hybrid KLAS which has a significantly improved accuracy rate in detecting the customer's product knowledge level.

The Future of M-Commerce
M-Commerce offers the possibility of an entire new level of financial flexibility, taking advantage of recent social and technological developments. Some difficulties affecting the introduction of mobile commerce are common to all new payment methods, and some are particular to widely differing industries that seek to operate under the banner of m-Commerce.

paybox is the most secure and effective payment application on the market. It has proven itself with consistent and easy operation in all purchasing situations, even outside of m-commerce. Universality and the Win-Win-Situation for every participant are main reasons for its fast penetration into the market. The construction of international networks puts paybox on the right track towards establishing an industry standard for mobile payment applications. 

Models for investment in electronic commerce--financial perspectives with empirical evidence

Electronic Commerce ("eCommerce") is a concept for trade based upon products and services that are being marketed, contracted, and paid for over the Internet. Consequently, electronic commerce demands for the investment in computer systems, arketing, logistics and payments. This paper will develop conditions for profitable investments in eCommerce with a special focus on outlays for information technology systems and sales management. If the services are made more standardized, if they do not change that often, or if they are well known to the customers so that there is little need for supplementary information, then the less costly will the information technology system become. The investment in marketing depends on how well known the brand name is to the customer. eCommerce firms "Born on the Net" have to spend substantially more resources on marketing than firms that "Move to the Net". These investments may be seen as parts of a process, which aims to generate larger revenues to the firm, better services to the customers, a more efficient logistic system, and lower payment costs. A financial perspective is taken, where investment outlays for web services and marketing are balanced to cost savings when serving existing customers and net revenues from the generation of new customers. This financial approach is applied to five case studies from the sectors of capital goods, financial services, food, ornamental horticulture, and books and stationeries, where the given background from practice and conditions for success are developed in terms of a customer-base, margins, and sales growth. It is demonstrated that an existing customer base offline reduces the need for a marketing that is costly. It is also shown that a combination of services online and offline improves customer services and increases the extension of repeat purchases.

The impacts of the integrated logistics systems on electronic commerce and enterprise resource planning systems

There has been a steady growth of information systems in inventory management, production, and logistics. This paper reports the results of a recent longitudinal study into the use of logistics information systems (LIS). The survey results reported herein highlight an increasing use of LIS and its ability to link functional areas of business. Additionally, the paper examines the role of two information system tools--electronic commerce (EC) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)--that had not been investigated in previous editions of the study. Information regarding the respondents EC and ERP adoption sequences, use of key subsystems, and relationships with integrated logistics systems are presented.

Keywords: Logistics; Supply chain management; Information systems; LIS; SCIS; ERP