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2.3 Customer Shopping Mechanisms: Webstores, Malls, and Portals 43

Types of Portals
telephones, as well as tools to build voice portals.
Portals can assume many shapes. One way to distinguish Voice portals are especially popular for 1–800 num-
among them is to look at their content, which can vary from bers (enterprise 800 numbers) that provide self-ser-
narrow to broad, and their community or audience, which vice to customers with information available in
also can differ. The major types of portals are as follows: Internet databases (e.g., finding your balance or last
deposit made at your bank).
• Knowledge portals. Knowledge portals enable
easy access to knowledge by company employees
• Commercial (public) portals. These popular por- and facilitate collaboration.
tals offer content for anyone. Although they can • Board portals. These portals support decision-
be customized by the user, they are still intended making (see Questex 2015).
for broad audiences and offer fairly routine content, • Community portals. These are usually parts of
some in real time (e.g., a stock ticker and news). online communities. They are dedicated to some
Examples of such sites are yahoo.com, google.com, theme and may be sponsored by a vendor such as
and msn.com. Sony. An example is gamespot.com/portal.
• Corporate (private) portals. Corporate portals
provide organized access to internal corporate
information. These also are known as enterprise
portals or enterprise information portals. Corporate The Roles and Value of Intermediaries
portals appear in different forms. Examples of in E-Marketplaces
e-commerce portals can be found at ibm.com/
software/products/en/websphere-portal-family. The two major types of online intermediaries are brokers
• Patient portals. Several companies offer patient and infomediaries.
portals, for example, WebMD and myUCLAhealth.
org. Patients have access to their personal informa- Brokers
tion. The UCLA portal also allows communication
between patients and their caregivers. A broker in EC is a person or a company that facilitates
• Publishing portals. These portals are intended for transactions between buyers and sellers. The following are
communities with specific interests and involve different types of brokers:
relatively little customization of content; however,
they provide extensive online search features and
some interactive capabilities. Examples of such
sites are informationweek.com.com and zdnet. • Trading. A company that aids online trading (e.g.,
com. E*TRADE or eBay).
• Mobile portals. Mobile portals are portals that are • Organization of online malls. A company that
accessible from mobile devices. An increasing organizes many online stores in one place (e.g.,
number of portals are accessible via mobile devices. Yahoo! Shopping and Alibaba.com).
One example of such a mobile portal is i-mode, • Comparison agent. A company that helps con-
which is described in Chapter 6. sumers compare prices, encourages user com-
• Voice portals. Voice portals are websites, usually ments, and provides customer service at different
portals, with audio interfaces. This means that they stores (e.g., Bizrate for a great diversity of products
can be accessed by a standard telephone or a cell and Hotwire, Inc. for travel-related products and
phone. AOLbyPhone (aolbyphone.com) is an services).
example of a service that allows users to retrieve • Shopping aids provider. A company that helps
e-mail, news, and other content from AOL via tele- online shopping by providing escrow, payments,
phone. It uses both speech recognition and text-to- shipping, and security (e.g., PuntoMio, Inc.) for
speech technologies. Products by companies such global shoppers.
as Microsoft’s Tellme (tmaa.com/microsoftand- • Matching services. These services match entities
247inc.html) offer access to the Internet from such as jobs to applicants, and buyers to sellers.