Glossary

Listing glossary terms 1 - 25 of 313

Affiliate
Companies that sell other manufacturers' or retailers' (sponsoring merchants) products on their Web sites. Users select a product at the affiliate Web site, but the sale is actually transacted at the sponsoring merchant's Web site. Affiliates are similar in concept to industry-based manufacturer representatives that sell multiple manufacturers' product lines.

Agent
Software that acts as an intermediary for a person by performing some activity. Agents can "learn" an individual's preferences and act in the person's best interest and may even negotiate and complete transactions. A purchasing manager's agent may learn corporate specifications, determine when inventory is low and search the Internet for the lowest-cost supplier.

Aggregator
Enables buyers within a market to select among various competitors by aggregating information about the market and its suppliers and providing this information via a Web site. Aggregators may provide decision-support applications that integrate supplier information with third-party information and with user requirements or preferences to allow users to differentiate services and features of the various competitors. Content aggregators aggregate information and match it to user preferences. These preferences may be declared actively (user explicitly specifies) or passively (software discerns preferences from user behavior or interest) and are used to filter aggregated content and deliver only what matches user preferences.

Application Service Provider (ASP)
ASPs aggregate, facilitate and broker IT services to deliver IT-enabled business solutions across a network via subscription-based pricing.

Auction
An electronic market, which can exist in both a business-to-business and business-to-consumer context. Sellers offer products or services to buyers through a Web site with a structured process for price-setting and fulfillment. Web auctions may follow English, Dutch, reverse-bid or sealed-bid processes.

Brick and Mortar
Describes a traditional company with no Web channels as a sales outlet for its products or services.

Business-to-Business Commerce (B2B)
Using electronic interactions to conduct business among enterprises, typically as a result of formal, contractual arrangements. B2B functions include sophisticated Web authorization and control (WAC) for delivery of sensitive price, contract and content information for each partner; catalogs that provide custom views based on access control and parametric search for serious business buyers; and order entry functions such as standardized "ship to" locations, dynamic order recalculation and payment options.

Business-to-Consumer Commerce (B2C)
Using electronic interactions to conduct business with consumers. B2C may include formal relationships (e.g., customers with assets under care or with subscription services or content) and ad hoc relationships (formed in real time to enable a new user to buy, sell or access information).

Business Intelligence (BI)
An interactive process of analyzing and exploring structured, domain-specific information (often stored in a data warehouse) to discern trends or patterns, thereby deriving insights and drawing conclusions. The BI process includes communicating findings and effecting change. BI domains include customers, products, services or competitors.

Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR)
Fundamental analysis and radical redesign of business processes and management systems to achieve dramatic change or performance improvement. BPR uses objective, quantitative methods and tools to analyze, redesign and transform business processes including their supporting organization structures, information systems, job responsibilities and performance standards.

Click and Mortar
Describes a company with physical outlets as well as an on-line presence for the sale of its products or services.

Collaborative Commerce (C-Commerce)
The collaborative, electronically enabled business interactions among an enterprise's internal personnel, business partners and customers throughout a trading community. The trading community could be an industry, industry segment, supply chain or supply chain segment.

Commerce Service Provider (CSP)
Service providers that specialize in Web-enabled e-commerce services, as well as those offering specific software or outsourcing support for these services.

Community
A constantly changing group of people collaborating and sharing their ideas over an electronic network (e.g., the Internet). Communities optimize their collective power by affiliation around a common interest, by the compression of the time between member interactions (i.e., communicating in real time), and by asynchronous "postings" which potentially reach more participants and allow for more reflection time than real-time interactions.

Competitive Intelligence (CI)
Analysis of an enterprise's marketplace to understand what is happening, what will happen and what it means to the firm. CI business goals may be offensive: to confidently position the firm in the marketplace, to plot a course for future positioning and to allocate short- and long-term resources; or defensive: to know what is happening, what may happen and how to react.

Content Provider
A firm whose products are information-based (content), including services to access and manage the content.

Cookies
Small files that are automatically downloaded from a Web server to the computer of someone browsing a Web site. Information stored in cookies can then be accessed any time that computer returns to the site. Cookies allow Web sites to "personalize" their appearance by identifying visitors, storing passwords, tracking preferences, and other possibilities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A technology-enabled strategy to convert data-driven decisions into business actions in response to, and in anticipation of, actual customer behavior. From a technology perspective, CRM represents the systems and infrastructure required to capture, analyze and share all facets of the customer's relationship with the enterprise. From a strategy perspective, it represents a process to measure and allocate organizational resources to those activities that have the greatest return and impact on profitable customer relationships.

Demand Aggregators
A term used to describe operators who 'collect' demand from consumers for a particular item. Priceline.com (airline tickets, hotel rooms, etc.) and Adauction.com (advertising space) are examples. These companies allow consumers to obtain discounts to market prices and allow sellers to sell what might otherwise go unsold and 'see' the latent demand for their goods/services that exists below the established price points.

E Business
Any Internet- or network- enabled business activity that transforms internal and external relationships to create value and exploit market opportunities driven by new rules of the 'connected economy'.

Electronic Commerce
The use of communication technologies to transmit business information and transact business. Taking an order over the telephone is a simple form of EC. Internet commerce is also EC, but is only one of several advanced forms of EC that use technology, integrated applications and business processes to link enterprises.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
The electronic exchange of trading documents (e.g., invoices and orders) to enable e-commerce. Originally conducted only through value-added networks, EDI is gradually moving to the Internet.

E-Marketplace
A Web site that enables buyers to select from many suppliers. E-marketplaces -- which focus on putting the buyer in control -- are buying environments that aggregate supplier content and provide decision support tools that enable a buyer to make the most informed decision.

Extranet
A collaborative, Internet-based network to link an enterprise with its suppliers, customers or other external business partners and to facilitate intercompany relationships. Extranets use Internet-derived applications and technology to become the secured extensions of internal business processes to external business partners.

Frictionless Commerce/Frictionless Economy
According to theory, the Internet is a nearly perfect market because information is instantaneous and buyers can compare the offerings of sellers worldwide. The result is fierce price competition, dwindling product differentiation, and vanishing brand loyalty. Real world evidence casts doubts on the validity of this theory. Positive Feedback Markets, Demand Side and Supply Side Economies of Scale, and Lock In and Switching Costs are concepts that rebut the notion of Frictionless Commerce.

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