Getting from A to B in the e-commerce world can be difficult. And
getting from B2B2C and back again can be even trickier. Danny
Bradbury unravels the alphabetti spaghetti of e-business
The computer industry has always been renowned for its jargon, but
the e-commerce revolution has generated a whole new language that
executives would do well to understand. This A-Z guide presents
some key terms that you'll need when speaking to people in the
know.
Adjustment
The euphemistic term used by dotcom start-ups for the market
crash in spring 2000. Also known as a market correction, it occurs
whenever enough investors realise they have valued their high-tech
portfolios way above their potential to pay for themselves.
E-commerce companies without viable business plans or with a high
burn rate are most likely to suffer from a market adjustment.
Burn rate
This is the amount of money a company consumes in excess of its
income on a monthly basis. Living beyond your means is one of the
defining characteristics of many e-commerce start-ups. Indeed, in
many cases, the industry actually encourages it, albeit
implicitly.
To make a name for yourself as an e-commerce start-up, you have
to become well known, creating a brand name that permeates the Web.
This is how Amazon made its mark, for example. Doing this often
involves buying other companies, at vastly inflated prices.
Spending more than you earn is fine for a while, but like gambling,
you need to know when to stop.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
One of the most hyped terms in the e-commerce sector - and there
are many - CRM is all about "owning" your customer. Rather than
mere personalisation technology, or computer telephony integration,
CRM can involve both of these technologies and many more.
It is a philosophy with many different facets. Indeed, many
suppliers and systems integrators will tell you this, secretly
rubbing their hands together at the prospect of huge consultancy
fees. Nevertheless, done well, it can lead to an increase in repeat
business, and a healthy level of cross sales.
Ideally, a CRM strategy should contain a well-constructed data
model, giving you the ability to analyse your customers and
second-guess their needs.
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
DRM is an increasingly popular subject following the debacle
around the online music exchange mechanism Napster, which was sued
this year by the Recording Industry Association of America. It is a
way of protecting your online content from unauthorised
copying.
DRM products and standards are now available for different types
of content, including music, video and electronic books. The Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is one of the better-known
standards in this area.
Exit route
This is one of the first phrases in the business plans of many
dotcom start-ups.
It describes the ultimate culmination of any "get rich quick"
strategy and, until the adjustment earlier this year, often
culminated in an initial public offering making the start-up's
founders paper millionaires. More recently, it has involved a trade
sale, although many companies adopting this approach will explain,
in surprised tones, that they had no idea it was going to
happen.
Five nines
This refers to the number of nines before and after the decimal
point when talking about system uptime. The number indicates a
percentage of total time when a system is up and running.
Not surprisingly, 99.999% uptime is the Holy Grail for
suppliers, who are constantly reinforcing the need for reliability
in e-commerce systems.
Hewlett-Packard has teamed up with Cisco, Oracle and BEA to form
the "five nines: five minutes" programme, which is committed to
making this figure viable by the end of this year. The five minutes
represents the unscheduled downtime each year that 99.999% uptime
would leave.
Gremlin
This virtual creature is the most common factor stopping
companies from reaching the five nines goal.
Gremlinscan comefromanywhere-badly writtencode,
inadequatelydesignedsoftware architectures,incompatible browsers or
even just server-based device drivers that cause problems in the
system.
They have been around since the start of computing, but they are
more noticeable within e-commerce systems, because they can create
problems for hundreds of thousands of customers at once, just
before they give you their credit card details.
They can therefore have a negative impact on your path to
profitability. Good software testing is vital when trying to weed
out gremlins, but unfortunately, this process is often left to the
poor 20-year-old schmuck taking a year out to work in an IT
department as part of a sandwich university course.
Hot potato
This is the game played by the business management within a
bricks-and-mortar company whenever an e-commerce project goes
wrong.
No one likes admitting to board-level management that they were
responsible for the failure of a huge e-commerce project which
represents a company's best chance for future growth.
Throwing the problem around like a hot potato is perceived to be
a good way to avoid taking the blame. A better way to deal with it
is to appoint someone who is responsible for the whole e-commerce
initiative in the first place, rather than trying to create an
e-commerce strategy by committee. Unfortunately, because e-commerce
spans so many parts of the business, it is all too easy to end up
with too many people at senior levels on the project.
Internet time
This is not the ridiculous marketing tool invented by Swatch as
a new universal time system for Internet users. Rather, it is the
time model used by stressed business managers and project leaders
when justifying the ultra-short deadlines that they have to work to
when developing e-commerce projects. For example: "Yes, I know you
used to get six months to develop this sort of system Colin, but
now we're working in Internet time."
While no one has applied exact temporal analysis to Internet
time, it's roughly analogous to dog years, one of which equals
seven human years. Luckily, your dog probably costs less to
maintain than the average e-commerce project.
Java
Originally intended as the foundation of the network computing
initiative, Java has turned into one of the most dominant
server-side component-based development technologies for e-commerce
players.
In 1995, everyone thought Java would be prevalent on every
desktop, replacing the Windows operating system altogether and
heralding a new generation of intelligent thin clients. Five years
later, it has more or less skipped the desktop and wound up in the
middle tier, in the form of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and
Enterprise Java Beans. It competes with Microsoft's Component
Object Model, which is an alternative component-based architecture
for e-commerce software developers.
Kevorking
Derived from Jack Kevorkian, the ill-famed "Dr Death" and
supporter of euthanasia in the US, this rather morbid verb is used
to describe the act of ending a project.
It should be used when terminating projects that were already on
their last legs; ie, "We Kevorked the project when we realised that
we had designed our server architecture independently of our legacy
data structure, meaning that we couldn't access our customer
data."
Kevorking a project usually leads to a frantic game of hot
potato, and in some extreme cases to an "ulp".
Low-hanging fruit
Low-hanging fruit is the term used to describe project
deliverables that are within easy reach. As such, it can be applied
to all types of IT project, whether e-commerce-related or not.
The smart project manager will look for low-hanging fruit that
can be delivered as part of the initial project roll-out, leaving
the juicier morsels until the second or third iterations. Trying to
capture all of the deliverables within the first iteration will
inevitably lead to a late and buggy Web application.
Putting a pretty fruit plate underneath the noses of your
board-level management will inevitably earn you brownie points and
ensure the on-going internal sponsorship of your project.
M-Commerce
Short for mobile commerce, this is the subject of the latest
supplier circle jerk, but for once it looks as though it may
actually catch on.
The idea is to use location information gathered from
next-generation mobile devices as a means to offer personalised
services to their owners. So, on arrival in a town, a service
provider could know where you were and offer you a cut-price hotel
room, along with reservations at a local restaurant, for example.
It could be the one thing that saves wireless application protocol
from being just another geek toy.
Not Com
If there's one thing that the adjustment did, it was to inspire
disillusionment among the venture capitalist community, which had
only just started to sit up and take notice of high-tech companies
in the UK in the past three or four years.
Consequently, many companies wanted to disassociate themselves
from the hitherto sexy dotcom moniker, and instead began marketing
themselves as businesses that just happened to base themselves on
the Internet. To be truly effective, however, these semantics have
to be accompanied by a decent business plan and an impressive
P2P.
Online exchange
The online exchange business has received much press coverage in
the past 18 months, as companies like Ariba and Commerce One worked
with vertical market players to develop market-specific trading
hubs online.
A trading hub is a place where companies in a specific sector,
say oil and gas, can buy and sell products and services relating to
that vertical sector, freeing themselves up from the paperwork and
inefficiencies associated with manual trading. It also gives rise
to interesting new business models, including online B2B auctions.
One major concern, however, has been the ownership of these
exchanges, which are often controlled by large, established players
within a particular space.
P2P
Following the adjustment, many e-commerce start-ups have been
forced to switch their emphasis from finding a viable exit route to
creating a solid business plan with a convincing path to
profitability. In order to impress wary venture capitalists, they
have had to replace the term "time to market" with "time to
profit". Doing so involves moderating your burn rate so that you
can create conditions whereby your expenditure is significantly
less than your revenue.
Quick fix
A quick fix is often used after a gremlin has been encountered
within an e-commerce project, but it isn't a very good way of
avoiding an unwelcome game of hot potato further down the line.
Quick fixes are generally only possible when dealing with minor
problems, and it is very difficult to apply them to a system that
has been badly designed from the start. A good example of a quick
fix would be the alteration of some Javascript within a Web page to
stop it returning an error.
Render wanderer
A render wanderer is someone who gets bored waiting for a Web
site to load, or for some snazzy graphics to display, and decides
to walk around the office annoying colleagues instead.
Unfortunately, many people are too busy trying to get a job done
to wander around the office, and will simply type in another URL or
go to another Web link to find a faster site that does the same
job. This has led to a collection of mind-numbing cliches by
over-eager marketing people convinced that they are the first to
discover them.
These include "the competition is just a click away" and the
over-quoted statistic that the average Web surfer waits eight
seconds before trying another Web site.
Sticky site
When building Web sites, companies should be eager to attract
visitors back to them on a regular basis. Such Web sites are often
called sticky sites, because people can't stay away from them.
Content management is the key to creating sticky sites, and the
basic rules are obvious, but difficult to execute without some
investment. Firstly, update your content regularly. Secondly, make
it particularly relevant to each user, ideally using
personalisation technologies.
Trade sale
Commonly known as acquisition, a trade sale is an ideal exit
route for e-commerce start-ups, especially now that initial public
offerings are frowned on in the wake of the adjustment. As early
entry into the market is one of the basic tenets of e-commerce,
bricks-and-mortar companies trying to get into the e-commerce space
are often eager to tempt technology start-ups into a trade sale, so
that they can acquire the technologies and branding necessary to
enter the e-commerce space without having to do it themselves.
Now that some dotcom start-ups have been devalued following
market disillusionment, some trade sales can be had at knock-down
prices.
Ulp
This is the sound made by business managers within e-commerce
start-ups who suddenly realise that their business plan was written
on the back of a fag packet, and that the company is about to go
down the tubes. To make it more realistic, say it while setting
light to a bunch of envelopes. This most closely approximates the
sound of someone burning their stock options.
VC (Venture capitalist)
A company that ploughs money into an e-commerce start-up in the
hope that it will grow rapidly and deliver a huge return on
investment. Often, venture capitalists will angle for a controlling
stake within a company in return for the funding to achieve the
necessary burn rate at an early stage.
Wap
The wireless application protocol is a mechanism for exchanging
data across cellular links with small footprint mobile devices. It
has been embraced by companies wanting to deliver products and
services to customers on the move. Still a very immature
technology, Wap was developed in 1997 by Unwired Planet (now
Phone.com), Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. Devices using it are only
able to display limited information because of screen size.
Hopefully, as third generation cellular networks begin to
deliver high data rates, and manufacturers develop mobile devices
with larger screens and more comprehensive input mechanisms, Wap
will develop into a more viable technology. Wap is very popular
with the m-commerce crowd.
XML
The Extensible Markup Language has become immensely popular as a
method of data integration in the past 18 months. It appears to
solve one of the major problems besetting business to business
e-commerce providers: data compatibility.
Most businesses store their data in different formats, which can
be a problem when they want to exchange it with other businesses.
XML is a language controlled by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
that can be used to write other languages describing specific types
of data.
Two particularly important aspects of XML are Document Type
Definitions (DTDs), a means of describing a language written in
XML, and a schema, which incorporates business process information
along with information about different data types within an
XML-based language. Many different XML-based languages have
emerged, including the Wireless Markup Language [WML], which is an
intrinsic part of Wap. Unfortunately, because there are so many, it
is difficult for businesses to know which ones to support. This is
the most overwhelming problem facing the XML community today.
YAPer
Short for Young Arrogant Programmer, this acronym is appropriate
because it describes the sound that they make during everyday
conversation. These employees, created by the need to develop
applications in Internet time at any cost, yap about everything,
including their ability to program Java, Wap and XML, and the fact
that they are already earning more than their bosses are, even
though they are only 23 years old. Yapers can be obnoxious and
annoying, but they also vital when you need a quick fix.
ZZZZ
The sound often heard coming from non-technical board members
when the IT director tries to explain the importance of e-commerce.
The sound can also be heard when salespeople start using particular
phrases during their frequent visits. These include Internet time,
five nines, and once again, the interminable "the competition is
just a click away".