Criteria E

CRITERIA E:

Benderoff, Eric. "Amazon takes a stab at iTunes market." Newsbank. 21 Jan. 2008
11BE979146020E30&p_docnum=9&s_doc_type=doc&p_queryname=800&p_product=SLC
T&p_theme=newcat&p_nbid=B6DU58FWMTIwMTAxNDcyMS43OTU4OTQ6MTo1OnFhdGFy>.

Hajewski, Doris. "Web sales kick up!" Newsbank . 22 Jan. 2008
1192A264786685B8&p_docnum=1&s_doc_type=doc&p_queryname=800&p_product=SLC
T&p_theme=newcat&p_nbid=D5DM48PGMTIwMDk4MTU4OS40MDE2NjQ6MTo1OnFhdGFy>.

Malykhina, Elena, and Tony Kontzer. "Online Sales Get Boost When Buyers
Return To ." Information
Week. 20 Jan. 2008 showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174401641>.

Petrecca, Laura. "Online shopping goes into high gear ." USA Today. 19 Jan. 2008
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Reed, Audrey. "Online shopping puts office computers at risk ." Newsbank. 18 Jan. 2008
2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:SLCT>.

Richtel, Matt, and Bob Tedeshi. "Online sales lose steam." New York Times. 14 Jan. 2008
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Criteria D

The problem that this portfolio addresses is how the online sales are affecting small businesses leading to an economical crisis and therefore a failure. Poor people have been greatly affected, and experts are trying to find ways in which we can solve this problem; there are different solutions to this problem but the feasible one is by providing technical expertise in order to expand their businesses by making people to get more information about this shop. I.T. expertise can create websites that could give an opportunity to show the items, prices offered by these shops; this will avoid big businesses from causing failures, also management expertise that will help to administrate the company in order to avoid big losses of money. Another component is an economical help by having a special taxation for big businesses; these taxations will be donated as fund raising for small businesses to evade unemployment and give financial help. The third component is providing the people with more information of the small shops, by using propaganda that will make people to feel more personal when shopping. It’s a good technique if the small businesses propose better guarantees for the shoppers, because this will increase their incomes.

Criteria C

Online sales have both positive and negative sides. Society is affected by both of the aspects, positive aspects as big companies are growing, and their incomes have been increasing tremendously. Prices are way lower and more bargains are usually offered. For example Amazon is going to open their own online music store and their prices are 10 cents cheaper than other music stores, for example Apple’s iTunes (Benderoff, 2007). Now Amazon is challenging and competing with other online stores in order to offer the best prices and innovations; the music offered in Amazon has advantages over others because the music is now compatible with MP3 device or music-playing mobile phone (Eric, 2007).

Evidence of online sales increasing selling shoes has increased up to 25% and giving $219.9 billion (Sentinel, 2007) this is showing how the income of this particular company has increased. And there are more online shops that are getting more money leading to the failure of some other “weak” businesses.

The negative side of this situation is that small businesses are being affected because the rate of people using online sales has increased and therefore small businesses have been totally closed. Also unemployment has increased because the small stores are being closed and therefore lots of people don’t have jobs leading to an economical crisis. While some get richer others get poorer. This is causing the middle class to disappear, the influence that online sales have over small businesses are that shopping becomes more impersonal because people are buying everything in big stores; people don't know where and how they are buying in those stores is affecting small shops. Another negative aspect is how some sites are dangerous for computers because situations like spywares, hackers, and credit card thefts can easily access to the data contained by the personal computers (Reed, 2007).

Criteria B second part

The IT background of the issue:
The widespread use of the internet has caused online shopping to be extremely demanding. Online shopping requires many components. Internet is a worldwide network of interconnected computers that allow sharing information from different websites. Using a network, people are able to buy items by using internet, but a browser is needed. A browser is a software program that allows people to share information and access to different kinds of websites. After using a browser the information that it’s given in an online shopping website by the users is sent in codes, and this process is called encryption. This coded information goes to the data based, which allows the seller to read the coded information and fill the order of the customer. The company recognizes what the consumer wants, and sends the product via the distributors.

Online shopping are expected to grow more than 25% over all (Richtel,2007) whilst a survey reported that 37% of the population (Kontzer, 2005) uses online retails as an opp5). Diagram 1 is an example of what percentage of the population buys or plans to buy gifts online. This percentage will increase during this year, but in some sectors more than others.


Most of the online shops as for example shop.org/bitzrate, their sales dastrically increased by 77%, and that near 52 million people are expected to use any kind of website (Kontzer,2005) that offers online sales in order to buy different items. In addition a Jupiter Research says that the growth rate of online shopping has peaked and therefore the growth rate will be slower to a 9% in this year (Tedeshi, 2007).