Page 8 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

viii Preface

User-Friendliness

While covering all major EC topics, this book is clear, simple, and well organized. It provides
all the basic definitions of terms as well as logical conceptual support. Furthermore, the book
is easy to understand and is full of interesting real-world examples and “war stories” that keep
readers’ interest at a high level. Relevant review questions are provided at the end of each sec-
tion, so the reader can pause to review and digest the new material.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The book is divided into 12 chapters grouped into 5 parts. Two tutorials are available as online
supplements.

BOOK’S LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon completion of this book, the reader will be able to:

1. Define all types of e-commerce systems and describe their major business and revenue
models.
2. Describe all the major mechanisms that are used in e-commerce.
3. Describe all methods of selling products and services online to individual consumers.
4. Understand all online business-to-business activities including procurement, auctions, and
collaboration.
5. Describe EC activities other than trading online, such as e-government, e-learning/train-
ing, intelligent systems, and e-health.
6. Relate the support services of payment, security, order fulfillment, and so forth to
e- commerce implementation.
7. Describe social media and networks, and social models as facilitators of social
commerce.
8. Describe the landscape of social commerce applications including social advertising and
shopping, enterprise social commerce, social market research, and crowdsourcing.
9. Understand the legal, social, ethical, and business environments within which e-commerce
operates.
10. Describe the global aspects of e-commerce as well as its use in SMEs and in developing
countries.

HOW THIS BOOK DIFFERS FROM ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
EIGHTH EDITION (EC 2015) FROM SPRINGER

This book is derived in part from Electronic Commerce 8th edition by Efraim Turban et al.,
Springer 2015, and from the third edition of Introduction to EC by Turban et al., Pearson 2013.
The major differences as compared to the EC 2015 book are as follows:

• This book is much smaller (450 pages versus 791 pages; 12 chapters vs. 16 chapters).
• This book has two tutorials vs. five in EC 2015.
• There are about 25% fewer cases and online files.
• EC 2015 is designed for one or two semesters; this book is designed for one quarter or
semester.