5.3 B2E Electronic Commerce

Pizzarama has many promotional events and is always trying out new recipes. In order for all of our stores to keep up, we utilize an intranet. Each store can log in to our main company’s server over the internet and access promotional tools as well as training to enable them to better serve our customers. To keep all private information being transferred over the internet safe, all access is done through a VPN. In addition, a firewall is set up to prevent unauthorized access to Pizzarama’s servers.

5.2 B2B Electronic Commerce

Our company uses an extranet to share inventory data with our suppliers. For example, each store, acting as a client, can automatically send an order to Kraft over the internet when they are low on pizza ingredients. These requests go to our supplier’s servers where the order is automatically processed and sent out. To ensure no unauthorized third parties are able to access our company’s private data, a firewall is set up on both our network and our supplier’s network. In addition, we connect through a VPN, which allows us to secure our private information

5.1 Critique Your Competitor's E-Commerce Website

There are six rules to getting and keeping customers in e-commerce. I have looked at Papajohns.com to determine how our competitor’s site stacks up against them.

The first rule is that websites should offer something unique. Their site seems to differ very little from the websites of competitors. In addition, one can get basically the same service by calling or picking up. Other than industry standard pizza customization, their website offers nothing unique.

The second rule states that the site should be pleasing. The website isn’t bunched up, but it is poorly designed. The front page has a picture of Papa John holding a football behind a green background. On a widescreen monitor, there is also a picture of a football field. In addition, the bottom of the website has a poor fade to white which contrasts very poorly with the rest of the site.

The third rule is the website must be easy to use and fast. The three main options at the top make it fairly easy to make your own pizza or order from their menu. Making and ordering the pizza also seem to be easy. Once you get into making your own pizza, you can easily select toppings and choose whether or not you want the topping on the whole pizza or just half. Alexa claims the site is faster than 66% of all sites on the web.

The fourth rule is that the website must motivate people to visit. There is nothing unique about the site to get you to visit, but it is easy to make sure you get your order right. In addition, each Papa Johns has special offers for specific areas which can be easily customized to each community and demographic.

 

The fifth rule is that you must advertise your presence on the web. When searching for terms like Pizza or Pizza delivery, Papa was either 2 or 3 on Google with similar results on Bing. According to Alexa all but one query that led people to papajohns.com had the words Papa Johns in it. Because of this, I would argue they are doing a poor job pulling people not already looking for their website in.

 

The sixth rule is to learn from your website. It is difficult to tell how much they are using web analytics to focus their website on the things their users care about. They have updated their pizza customizer to make it more visual, allowing a customer to better see how their custom pizza is constructed. In addition, the focus on speed seems to show they know how quickly a customer will go to a competitor if they have to wait for a page to load.

4.4 Entity Relationship Diagram

            Pizzarama’s entity relationship diagram has been set up to show all of our company’s data relates to each other. There are four entities that we collect data on is the invoice, product, company, and customer. All the data of an entity is collected on their own database table. All of Pizzarama’s customers are listed as a record. All of the data we store on them are listed as attributes of their record. Each attribute has a meaning to the user and must be identified by its attribute type. This is what determines what the attribute is actually representing. In addition, different data types might be used to determine whether data being entered is alpha-numeric, a price, or a data.

            We identify customers by their customer key, which stays the same regardless of phone number change, name change, or address change. Each record has its own unique key that allows us to form a relationship with other database tables. An invoice, for example, will have its own unique key, the customer key of the customer who made the purchase, the product key of the product the customer purchased, as well as the company’s key. By doing this we allow newly created invoices to automatically display any information that has been updated such as a new address or phone number.

4.2 Packet Switching Technology

The picture above shows two clients requesting data from two servers. Each server and client is connected to a router which can be located via its IP address. Because of the large size of the data and limited amount of bandwidth, the data request must be broken up into packets in order to have packet-switching technology. Each packet must have a header that contains all the information required to find the client’s router and to allow that router to reassemble the data properly. It must also delete redundant packets and re-request missing packets. All of this is handled by the TCP, or transmission control protocol, of the router. When a packet fits this standard, it is considered an IP datagram. After being sent from the router, the actual transference of data occurs of the IP or Internet Protocol.

4.1 IFS H/W Infrastructure

The picture above shows a computer displaying the message “Hello,” demonstrating how it translates it to a readable format and what the computer knows. When a user uses an input
technology, such as a keyboard which is hooked up to a computer, to enter a letter, the computer must translate it into a binary. Binary code is made up of 1s and 0s that are read as activated or deactivated electrical charges, respectively, by the CPU, a processing technology. In ASCII, each letter takes up one byte, which in turn is made up of eight bits (a single binary digit). The CPU’s ALU handles all of the mathematical functions of the processor, while the control unit schedules the order in which the data is read. After the computer performs all of these actions, it displays the ASCII letters to an output technology, such as a monitor where it appears to be the English word “Hello.”