Mini-Research Project

Group Mini-Research Project

Introduction

Having problems with deciding and booking for hotels?

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Look no further than hotels.com, which is a provider of hotel accommodation worldwide, offering reservation services through its own network of localised websites and its telephone call centres. In fact, there are many other websites providing such services. This is widely known as e-commerce. E-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. E-commerce became "hot" with the advent of the internet. There are three main platforms or categories of e-commerce. They are Business to business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) and Consumer to Consumer (C2C).

Objectives

In our project, we are required to conduct a research study of one e-commerce transaction broker e-business model. A transaction broker is a person or firm who/which acts as an intermediary between sellers and buyers. They assist buyers and sellers in the buying and selling process and earn a commission for each successful transaction. In our case, we will be conducting research on hotels.com, which is using a B2C platform.

Purposes

Hotels.com gives travellers one of the widest selections of accommodation on the net, including both independent and major chain hotels as well as self-catering in over 100,000 properties worldwide. The company offers a one-stop shopping source for hotel pricing, amenities and availability and also specialises in providing travellers with accommodation during sold-out periods.

Design

The design of hotels.com is user friendly and easy to navigate. On the main page itself, there is a search engine, where users can search for the most suitable hotels according to their preferences, such as location, dates and rooms. This will enable users to be able to find out more about their interested hotels as well as other details and map of the surrounding landmarks.

Strengths

· It is ubiquitous. You are able to have access it to anywhere and anytime as long as you have access to the internet.

· It offers global reach. Is is able to cross cultural and national boundaries.

· It operates according to universal standards. It lowers market entry for merchants and search costs for consumers.

· It provides information richness and thus provides a more powerful selling environment.

· It is interactive. Not only can it simulate face-to-face experience but it is on a global scale too.

· It increases information density, the amount and quality of information available to all market participants.

· It permits personalization and customization to cater to every unique individual.

· It also increase dis-intermediation where you need not look for agents to book hotel rooms.

Weaknesses

· It might not be up to date to the exact second

· It may have security and Privacy problems

· The reliability of the site is questionable. There might be problems with booking. Examples like error in booking system or not getting what you wish for.

· If website is down, it might affect business.

· There might be viruses on the website.

· The reviews given by netizens might not be reliable. It can be written by someone related to the site.

Security and Privacy

Hotels.com is secured by GeoTrust. This means that so as to ensure our security, Hotels.com L.P. utilises a secure commerce server, which encrypts the credit card number and encodes it into a non-usable form.

Hotels.com also takes steps to help protect the personally identifiable information you provide to us. For example, we use leading encryption technology to encrypt credit card numbers. We also restrict access to personally identifiable information to those employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, our billing clerk or a customer service representative). In addition, the servers that store personally identifiable information are contained in a locked facility.

Pitfalls or problems

Although the information and credit card numbers are secured, the main pitfall is the leakage of passwords that are not related to the website. The problem might lie with the computer itself. Especially when using a public computer, there may be a chance of the computer being infected by a virus or have been installed with malicious software that are capable of capturing and storing of private information that was used on that particular computer.

Credits

Wikipedia.com

Hotels.com