Search Results (9)

In today’s competitive environment of online service industries, particularly e-commerce, meeting consumer expectations is essential for service providers to ensure service quality. However, service failures are unavoidable, leading to unfavorable consequences for businesses. Understanding the mechanisms for customer recovery after negative service experiences is crucial. Using cognitive–emotional personality systems theory and benign violation theory, this study constructed a theoretical model. A total of 351 samples were collected through a situational simulation experiment for a linear regression analysis. A self-mocking response strategy positively influenced brand trust through perceived brand authenticity regarding the dimensions of credibility, integrity, and symbolism. Simultaneously, brand trust was identified as a key driver of post-recovery satisfaction. This study proposes a chain mediation model, which incorporates perceived authenticity and brand trust, to fully comprehend the mechanisms underlying consumers’ satisfaction after service recovery. Our findings provide empirical evidence for the effects of self-mockery on post-recovery satisfaction, as well as suggestions for marketers seeking efficient means to meet consumers’ emotional and cognitive demands during service recovery situations. Full article

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Distributed Computing Systems (DCS) is transforming business models across industries. IoT devices allow immediate monitoring of equipment and processes, mitigating lost time and enhancing efficiency. In this case, manufacturing companies use IoT sensors to monitor machinery, predict failures, and schedule maintenance. Also, automation via IoT reduces manual intervention, resulting in boosted productivity in smart factories and automated supply chains. IoT devices generate this vast amount of data, which businesses analyze to gain insights into customer behavior, operational inefficiencies, and market trends. In turn, Distributed Computing Systems process this data, providing actionable insights and enabling advanced analytics and machine learning for future trend predictions. While, IoT facilitates personalized products and services by collecting data on customer preferences and usage patterns, enhancing satisfaction and loyalty, IoT devices support new customer interactions, like wearable health devices, and enable subscription-based and pay-per-use models in transportation and utilities. Conversely, real-time monitoring enhances security, as distributed systems quickly respond to threats, ensuring operational safety. It also aids regulatory compliance by providing accurate operational data. In this way, this study, through a Bibliometric Literature Review (LRSB) of 91 screened pieces of literature, aims at ascertaining to what extent the aforementioned capacities, overall, enhance business models, in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. The study concludes that those systems altogether leverage businesses, promoting competitive edge, continuous innovation, and adaptability to market dynamics. In particular, overall, the integration of both IoT and Distributed Systems in business models augments its numerous advantages: it develops smart infrastructures e.g., smart grids; edge computing that allows data processing closer to the data source e.g., autonomous vehicles; predictive analytics, by helping businesses anticipate issues e.g., to foresee equipment failures; personalized services e.g., through e-commerce platforms of personalized recommendations to users; enhanced security, while reducing the risk of centralized attacks e.g., blockchain technology, in how IoT and Distributed Computing Systems altogether impact business models. Future research avenues are suggested. Full article

Customers in resource-poor communities still grapple with many information and communication technology (ICT) failures as they strive to access goods and services in small and medium enterprises near them. From a customer perspective, these challenges often lead to stress-related issues such as frustrations and anxiety, which can even result in transaction abandonment. Extended ICT failures result in SMEs failing to achieve sustainable e-commerce. This study delves into the impact of ICT initiatives by SMEs in stress-inducing environments on customers’ quality of life. The study further examines whether customer stress and happiness play a role in this association. Quantitative data were acquired using the mall intercept method, while the developed hypotheses were examined using structural equation modeling (SEM) in SMART-PLS 4. The results shed light on how customers navigate daily ICT-related failures experienced by SMEs operating in poor resource communities as they strive for happiness and stress-free lives, ultimately leading to an improved quality of life. The study recommends that the government, through its agencies, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies and the Department of Science and Technology, among others, not only create an environment supporting SME ICT initiatives but also find strategies for sustaining SME ICT adoption for improved human well-being and socio-economic development within resource-constrained communities. Full article

Despite the popularity of AI-oriented e-commerce live-streaming, the service failures that can result from real-time interaction and instant transactions have not been taken seriously. This study aims to assess the failure of AI-oriented live-streaming e-commerce services and help retailers identify various risks. Based on expectancy disconfirmation theory and a stressor–strain–outcome framework, this study identified a comprehensive framework including information, functional, system, interaction, and aesthetic failures. The structural equation modeling (SEM) method is used to further examine its effect on consumers’ discontinuance behavior. Further research reveals the mediating role of consumer disappointment and emotional exhaustion, as well as the moderating role of the live-streaming platform type. These results shed light on the negative influence of AI-oriented live-streaming e-commerce service failures and contribute to the literature on live-streaming commerce, service failure, and virtual streamers. Full article

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and/or services over the internet. In recent years, e-commerce has experienced tremendous growth due to the popularity of and access to the internet throughout the world. Many companies have seen an opportunity in this market, starting to offer their products and/or services online. However, developing electronic commerce platforms can be complex and requires technical skills and specialized knowledge, which has become a problem due to the need to comply with the standards and requirements of customers who request to join these channels. Microenterprises in particular often need more resources and experience building e-commerce platforms. This is an exploratory case study, the objective of which is to design a proposal to improve an e-commerce platform development process for a computer enterprise from Valdivia, Chile, based on the international standard ISO 10008. Therefore, a solution is proposed for microenterprises to standardize their processes and improve their competitiveness in an increasingly demanding market, incorporating a methodology based on a review of quality management and customer satisfaction guidelines for e-commerce that allow the identification of internal and external failures, to prevent problems and achieve acceptable results. The proposal includes suggestions on how to improve the user experience on platforms, make the purchase and payment process more efficient, develop a support section for the computer microenterprise, and improve the security and privacy of customer data. The study of this quality regulation is one of the first at the national level, paving the way for developing proposals for other microenterprises in the country and, in turn, for the study and implementation of guidelines for business-to-consumer electronic commerce transactions (B2C ETC). Full article

The deployment of optical network infrastructure and development of new network services are growing rapidly for beyond 5/6G networks. However, optical networks are vulnerable to several types of security threats, such as single-point failure, wormhole attacks, and Sybil attacks. Since the uptake of e-commerce and e-services has seen an unprecedented surge in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the security of these transactions is essential. Blockchain is one of the most promising solutions because of its decentralized and distributed ledger technology, and has been employed to protect these transactions against such attacks. However, the security of blockchain relies on the computational complexity of certain mathematical functions, and because of the evolution of quantum computers, its security may be breached in real-time in the near future. Therefore, researchers are focusing on combining quantum key distribution (QKD) with blockchain to enhance blockchain network security. This new technology is known as quantum-secured blockchain. This article describes different attacks in optical networks and provides a solution to protect networks against security attacks by employing quantum-secured blockchain in optical networks. It provides a brief overview of blockchain technology with its security loopholes, and focuses on QKD, which makes blockchain technology more robust against quantum attacks. Next, the article provides a broad view of quantum-secured blockchain technology. It presents the network architecture for the future research and development of secure and trusted optical networks using quantum-secured blockchain. The article also highlights some research challenges and opportunities. Full article

To meet the different needs of consumers in an E-commerce market environment, more and more enterprises have launched extended warranty services, which can reduce consumer risk and stimulate market demand in E-commerce supply chains. However, knowing who will launch the extended warranty services has become particularly important. To propose an optimal strategy of the extended warranty service provider and seller, three game models are constructed in an E-commerce supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and an E-commerce platform. In addition, this study investigated the effect of extended warranty strategy on consumers. The results show that when the extended warranty coverage and product failure probability are small, the extended warranty provided by the E-commerce platform can simulate the demand of products and extended warranty. The extended warranty provided by the manufacturer is the best choice for the manufacturer. On the other hand, the extended warranty provided by the E-commerce platform is always beneficial for the E-commerce platform and E-commerce supply chain system. The E-commerce platform should take some measures and control some parameters to make up for the losses of the manufacturer, so that the strategy of the extended warranty provided and sold by the E-commerce platform becomes the consistent choice of E-commerce supply-chain members, system, and consumers. Full article

The saga pattern manages transactions and maintains data consistency across distributed microservices via utilizing local sequential transactions that update each service and publish messages to trigger the next ones. Failure by one transaction causes the execution of compensating transactions that counteract the preceding one. However, saga lacks isolation, meaning that reading and writing data from an incomplete transaction is allowed. Therefore, this research proposes an enhanced saga pattern that resolves the lack of isolation issue via the use of the quota cache and the commit-sync service. Some transactions will be transferred from the database layer to the memory layer. Thus, no wrong commit to the main database will occur. If a microservice fails to be completed, the other microservices will run compensation transactions to rollback the changes that only affect the cache layer instead of the database layer. Database commit will be performed when all transactions are completed successfully. A lightweight microservices-based e-commerce system was implemented for comparison. Experiments were conducted for validation and evaluation. Results demonstrate that the proposal has the capability of resolving the lack of isolation. Results indicate that the proposal achieves better performance not only in typical cases but also in the scenario that needs to handle exceptions. Full article

An Input validation can be a critical issue. Typically, a little attention is paid to it in a web development project, because overenthusiastic validation can tend to cause failures in the software, and can also break the security upon web applications such as an unauthorized access to data. Now, it is estimated the web application vulnerabilities (such as XSS or SQL injection) for more than two thirds of the reported web security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we start with a case study of the bypassing data validation and security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and then go on to discuss the merits of a number of common data validation techniques. We also review the different solutions to date to provide data validation techniques in ecommerce applications. From this analysis, a new data validation service which is based upon semantic web Technologies, has been designed and implemented to prevent the web security vulnerabilities at the application level and to secure the web system even if the input validation modules are bypassed. Our semantic architecture consists of the following components: RDFa annotation for elements of web pages, interceptor, RDF extractor, RDF parser, and data validator. The experimental results of the pilot study indicate that the proposed data validation service might provide a detection, and prevention of some web application attacks. Full article