• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.123-137
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• 2007

The advent of the Internet and related Web technologies has created an easily accessible link between a firm and its customers, and has provided opportunities to a firm to use information technology to support supplementary after-sale services associated with a product or service. It has been widely recognized that supplementary services are an important source of customer value and of competitive advantage as the characteristics of the product itself. Many of these supplementary services are information-based and need not be co-located with the product, so more and more companies are delivering these services electronically. Net-based customer service, which is defined as an Internet-based computerized information system that delivers services to a customer, therefore, is the core infrastructure for supplementary service provision. The importance of net-based customer service in delivering supplementary after-sale services associated with product has been well documented. The strategic advantages of well-implemented net-based customer service are enhanced customer loyalty and higher lock-in of customers, and a resulting reduction in competition and the consequent increase in profits. However, not all customers utilize such net-based customer service. The digital divide is the phenomenon in our society that captures the observation that not all customers have equal access to computers. Socioeconomic factors such as race, gender, and education level are strongly related to Internet accessibility and ability to use. This is due to the differences in the ability to bear the cost of a computer, and the differences in self-efficacy in the use of a technology, among other reasons. This concept, applied to e-commerce, has been called the "e-commerce divide." High Internet penetration is not eradicating the digital divide and e-commerce divide as one would hope. Besides, to accommodate personalized support, a customer must often provide personal information to the firm. This personal information includes not only name and address, but also preferences information and perhaps valuation information. However, many recent studies show that consumers may not be willing to share information about themselves due to concerns about privacy online. Due to the e-commerce divide, and due to privacy and security concerns of the customer for sharing personal information with firms, limited numbers of customers adopt net-based customer service. The limited level of customer adoption of net-based customer service affects the firm profits and the customers' welfare. We use a game-theoretic model in which we model the net-based customer service system as a mechanism to enhance customers' loyalty. We model a market entry scenario where a firm (the incumbent) uses the net-based customer service system in inducing loyalty in its customer base. The firm sells one product through the traditional retailing channels and at a price set for these channels. Another firm (the entrant) enters the market, and having observed the price of the incumbent firm (and after deducing the loyalty levels in the customer base), chooses its price. The profits of the firms and the surplus of the two customers segments (the segment that utilizes net-based customer service and the segment that does not) are analyzed in the Stackelberg leader-follower model of competition between the firms. We find that an increase in adoption of net-based customer service by the customer base is not always desirable for firms. With low effectiveness in enhancing customer loyalty, firms prefer a high level of customer adoption of net-based customer service, because an increase in adoption rate decreases competition and increases profits. A firm in an industry where net-based customer service is highly effective loyalty mechanism, on the other hand, prefers a low level of adoption by customers.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2018

From the 21st century, various high-quality services have come up with the growth of the internet or 'Information and Communication Technologies'. Especially, the scale of E-commerce industry in which Amazon and E-bay are standing out is exploding in a large way. As E-commerce grows, Customers could get what they want to buy easily while comparing various products because more products have been registered at online shopping malls. However, a problem has arisen with the growth of E-commerce. As too many products have been registered, it has become difficult for customers to search what they really need in the flood of products. When customers search for desired products with a generalized keyword, too many products have come out as a result. On the contrary, few products have been searched if customers type in details of products because concrete product-attributes have been registered rarely. In this situation, recognizing texts in images automatically with a machine can be a solution. Because bulk of product details are written in catalogs as image format, most of product information are not searched with text inputs in the current text-based searching system. It means if information in images can be converted to text format, customers can search products with product-details, which make them shop more conveniently. There are various existing OCR(Optical Character Recognition) programs which can recognize texts in images. But existing OCR programs are hard to be applied to catalog because they have problems in recognizing texts in certain circumstances, like texts are not big enough or fonts are not consistent. Therefore, this research suggests the way to recognize keywords in catalog with the Deep Learning algorithm which is state of the art in image-recognition area from 2010s. Single Shot Multibox Detector(SSD), which is a credited model for object-detection performance, can be used with structures re-designed to take into account the difference of text from object. But there is an issue that SSD model needs a lot of labeled-train data to be trained, because of the characteristic of deep learning algorithms, that it should be trained by supervised-learning. To collect data, we can try labelling location and classification information to texts in catalog manually. But if data are collected manually, many problems would come up. Some keywords would be missed because human can make mistakes while labelling train data. And it becomes too time-consuming to collect train data considering the scale of data needed or costly if a lot of workers are hired to shorten the time. Furthermore, if some specific keywords are needed to be trained, searching images that have the words would be difficult, as well. To solve the data issue, this research developed a program which create train data automatically. This program can make images which have various keywords and pictures like catalog and save location-information of keywords at the same time. With this program, not only data can be collected efficiently, but also the performance of SSD model becomes better. The SSD model recorded 81.99% of recognition rate with 20,000 data created by the program. Moreover, this research had an efficiency test of SSD model according to data differences to analyze what feature of data exert influence upon the performance of recognizing texts in images. As a result, it is figured out that the number of labeled keywords, the addition of overlapped keyword label, the existence of keywords that is not labeled, the spaces among keywords and the differences of background images are related to the performance of SSD model. This test can lead performance improvement of SSD model or other text-recognizing machine based on deep learning algorithm with high-quality data. SSD model which is re-designed to recognize texts in images and the program developed for creating train data are expected to contribute to improvement of searching system in E-commerce. Suppliers can put less time to register keywords for products and customers can search products with product-details which is written on the catalog.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.221-241
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• 2018

Deep learning is getting attention recently. The deep learning technique which had been applied in competitions of the International Conference on Image Recognition Technology(ILSVR) and AlphaGo is Convolution Neural Network(CNN). CNN is characterized in that the input image is divided into small sections to recognize the partial features and combine them to recognize as a whole. Deep learning technologies are expected to bring a lot of changes in our lives, but until now, its applications have been limited to image recognition and natural language processing. The use of deep learning techniques for business problems is still an early research stage. If their performance is proved, they can be applied to traditional business problems such as future marketing response prediction, fraud transaction detection, bankruptcy prediction, and so on. So, it is a very meaningful experiment to diagnose the possibility of solving business problems using deep learning technologies based on the case of online shopping companies which have big data, are relatively easy to identify customer behavior and has high utilization values. Especially, in online shopping companies, the competition environment is rapidly changing and becoming more intense. Therefore, analysis of customer behavior for maximizing profit is becoming more and more important for online shopping companies. In this study, we propose 'CNN model of Heterogeneous Information Integration' using CNN as a way to improve the predictive power of customer behavior in online shopping enterprises. In order to propose a model that optimizes the performance, which is a model that learns from the convolution neural network of the multi-layer perceptron structure by combining structured and unstructured information, this model uses 'heterogeneous information integration', 'unstructured information vector conversion', 'multi-layer perceptron design', and evaluate the performance of each architecture, and confirm the proposed model based on the results. In addition, the target variables for predicting customer behavior are defined as six binary classification problems: re-purchaser, churn, frequent shopper, frequent refund shopper, high amount shopper, high discount shopper. In order to verify the usefulness of the proposed model, we conducted experiments using actual data of domestic specific online shopping company. This experiment uses actual transactions, customers, and VOC data of specific online shopping company in Korea. Data extraction criteria are defined for 47,947 customers who registered at least one VOC in January 2011 (1 month). The customer profiles of these customers, as well as a total of 19 months of trading data from September 2010 to March 2012, and VOCs posted for a month are used. The experiment of this study is divided into two stages. In the first step, we evaluate three architectures that affect the performance of the proposed model and select optimal parameters. We evaluate the performance with the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model, which combines both structured and unstructured information, is superior compared to NBC(Naïve Bayes classification), SVM(Support vector machine), and ANN(Artificial neural network). Therefore, it is significant that the use of unstructured information contributes to predict customer behavior, and that CNN can be applied to solve business problems as well as image recognition and natural language processing problems. It can be confirmed through experiments that CNN is more effective in understanding and interpreting the meaning of context in text VOC data. And it is significant that the empirical research based on the actual data of the e-commerce company can extract very meaningful information from the VOC data written in the text format directly by the customer in the prediction of the customer behavior. Finally, through various experiments, it is possible to say that the proposed model provides useful information for the future research related to the parameter selection and its performance.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.67-98
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• 2017

This study intended to investigate to what extent country image of America and previous visit experience affect the cross-border shopping intention. In particular, the present study used a country image measurement brought from another research study the factors of which are economy-technology image, social-cultural image, and citizen image. A total of 155 respondents participated in the survey targeting Korean citizen for the present study. Single regression, multiple regression, and independent t-test were conducted for data analysis. The result of the single regression indicated that country image is a critical predictor of cross-border shopping intention. The Multiple regression revealed that among three factors composing country image, social-cultural image plays the most significant and economy-technology image plays the second-most significant role in influencing cross-border shopping intention. However, it was found that citizen image does not play a substantial role for some reason. Moreover, the result of t-test showed that those who have a prior visit experience to America are more likely to buy products online from America than those who don't have prior visit experience. More detailed findings and implications will be discussed in the manuscript.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.119-144
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• 2003

This study attempts to figure out the impact of Information and communication technologies (ICTs) on spatial structure and to speculate on spatial strategies in the electronic economy from a geographical perspective. The unprecedented development of ICTs based on the explosive use of the Internet was enough to lead to the expectation that physical distance would not be a significant barrier in business activities. In fact, however, at least at a current stage, the development of ICTs has not automatically removed the inequality in spatial structure. The accessibility to electronic space is different by economic and social status within a country as well as between countries. The importance of place, locality, and place-specific assets has been strengthened in the global economy. Physical proximity is still of great importance because it helps to minimize transaction costs, to exploit place-specific social networks, and to accumulate credibility for successful businesses. Likewise, the development of electronic commerce such as B2B and B2C EC also does not necessarily result in the ignorance of place and locality. Rather, the recognition of the importance of spatial strategies is extremely important for the success in online businesses. As a conclusion, the spatial dimension becomes more important in the digital era for successful businesses and balanced regional developments than ever before. The need for the improvement of ICT infrastructures, the development of human resources, and the establishment of regional innovation systems in peripheral areas cannot be overemphasized even in the digital era.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.113-132
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• 2007

Price rigidity involves prices that do not change with the regularity predicted by standard economic theory. It is of long-standing interest for firms, industries and the economy as a whole. However, due to the difficulty of measuring price rigidity and price adjustments directly, only a few studies have attempted to provide empirical evidence for explanatory theories from Economics and Marketing. This paper proposes and validates a research model to examine different theories of price rigidity and to predict what variables can explain the observed empirical regularities and variations in price adjustment patterns of Internet-based retailers. I specify and test a model using more than 3 million daily observations on 385 books, 118 DVDs and 154 CDs, sold by 22 Internet-based retailers that were collected over a 676-day period from March 2003 to February 2005. I obtained a number of interesting findings from the estimation of our logit model. First, quality seems to play a role-I find that both price levels as proxies for store quality, and information on the quality of a product consumers have, affect online price rigidity. Second, greater competition(i.e., less industry concentration) leads to less price rigidity(i.e., more price changes) on the Internet. I also find that Internet-based sellers more frequently change the prices of popular products, and the sellers with broader product coverage change prices less frequently, which seem due to economic forces faced by these Internet-based sellers. To the best of my knowledge, this research is the first to empirically assess price rigidity patterns for multiple industries in Internet-based retailing, and attempt to explain the variation in these patterns. I found that price changes are more likely to be driven by quality, competitive and economic considerations. These results speak to both the IS and economics literatures. To the IS literature these results suggest we take economic considerations into account in more sophisticated ways. The existence and variation in price rigidity argue that simplistic assumptions about frictionless and completely flexible digital prices do not capture the richness of pricing behavior on the Internet. The quality, competitive and economic forces identified in this model suggest promising directions for future theoretical and empirical work on their role in these technologically changing markets. To the economics literature these results offer new evidence on the sources of price rigidity, which can then be incorporated into the development of models of pricing at the firm, industry and even macro-economic level of analysis. It also suggests that there is much to be learned through interdisciplinary research between the IS, economics and related business disciplines.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.33-44
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• 2019

Purpose - As the scope of existing digital transformation expanded to various degrees, the Fourth Industrial Revolution came into being. In 2016, Klaus Schwab, Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), said that the new technologies that lead the fourth industrial revolution are AI, Block chain, IoT, Big Data, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. This technology is expected to be a full-fledged fusion of digital, biological and physical boundaries. Everything in the world is connected to the online network, and the trend of 'block chain' technology is getting attention because it is a core technology for realizing a super connective society. If the block chain is commercialized at the World Knowledge Forum (WKF), it will be a platform that can be applied to the entire industry. The block chain is rapidly evolving around the financial sector, and the impact of block chains on logistics, medical services, and public services has increased beyond the financial sector. Research design, data, and methodology - Figure analysis of data and social science analytical software of IBM SPSS AMOS 23.0 and IBM Statistics 23.0 were used for all the data researched. Data were collected from hotel employees in China from 25th March to 10th May. Results - The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the block chain characteristics of the existing hotel reservation system on the intention to use and to examine the influence of the block chain characteristics of the hotel reservation system on the intention to use, We rearranged the variables having the same or similar meaning and analyzed the effect of these factors on the intention to use the block chain characteristic of the hotel reservation system. 339 questionnaires were used for analysis. Conclusions - There are only sample hotel workers in this study, and their ages are in their 20s and 30s. In future studies, samples should be constructed in various layers and studied. In this study, the block chain characteristics are set as five variables as security, reliability, economical efficiency, availability, and diversity. Among them, Security and reliability made positive effects on the perceived usefulness. Also, security and economics did on the perceived ease. Availability and diversity did on both perceived usefulness and perceived ease. Perceived ease did on perceived usefulness. And perceived ease and perceived usefulness did on user intent. But security and economics did not on the perceived usefulness

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.3-26
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• 2011

The objective of this study is to improve export performance using e-Trade marketing systems. The use of e-Trade has been increasing but there is some controversy about the performance of e-Trade marketing for Small-to-Medium enterprises (SME). The research construct for determining the export performance is suggested and five factors are introduced in this paper such as: B2B relationship and cooperation, product complexity, online fitness, level of internationalization, and use of e-Trade marketing. Sample data were collected from the companies who are familiar with the e-Trade systems. The result shows that the use of e-Trade marketing mostly contributes to the increase of export performance. The regression and cluster analysis shows that both variables of e-Trade marketing and on-line fitness are significant to high export performance group. The implication for SMEs is that the use of e-Trade marketing methods could contribute to the increase of export performance and more analytical works need to be made for future study.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.1689-1697
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• 2018

This paper explored how to design amobile application for Korea's traditional markets based on O2O service and data science technologies. In order to cover a broader scope of customers, diversify the ways to sell products, and increase the profits of Korea's traditional markets, the application bridges online customers with offline stores at traditional markets and augments both convenience and accessibility. Beyond the typical face-to-face interactions between customers and sellers at traditional markets, this application offers mobile payments and personalized recommendations of nearby stores and preferable products using Beacon and datascience technologies. Moreover, it offers multi-language support for foreign customers who are not familiar with Korea's traditional markets and the products sold there. In conclusion, using O2O service, which is a rising trend among prevalent platform technologies, this study proposed a new e-commerce model for Korea's traditional markets to promote market expansion.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.59-77
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• 2016

Although various recommendation techniques have been applied to the e-commerce market, few studies compare the intent to use these techniques from the customer's perspective. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of customers' intention to use five recommendation techniques widely adapted by online shopping malls and focus on the differences in purchasing electronic goods and apparel products. The recommendation techniques are as follows: best-seller recommendation, merchandiser recommendation, content-based recommendation, collaborative filtering recommendation, and social recommendation. Additionally, we examine which factors influence customer intent to use the recommendation services. Data were collected through a survey administered to 220 e-commerce users with prior experience with recommendation services. Collected data were examined using analysis of variance and regression analysis. Results indicate statistically significant differences in customers' intention to use recommendation services according to the recommendation technique. In particular, the best-seller recommendation technique is preferred when purchasing electronic goods, whereas the content-based recommendation technique is preferred for apparel purchases. Factors such as personal characteristics and personality, purchasing tendency, as well as perception of the product or recommendation service affect a customer's intention to use a recommendation service. However, the influence of these factors varies depending on the recommendation technique. This study provides guidelines for companies to adopt appropriate recommendation techniques according to product categories and personal characteristics of customers.