Shopping Networks And The Online Retail Community

During the last Christmas season, Target announced that their data security was breached. According to David Lazarus in Los Angeles Times, Target stated that roughly 110 million customers’ information was illegally taken from their database. The information included their credit/debit card info, phone numbers, and email addresses. Target is one of the most popular grocery stores in the U.S.; they have a substantial amount of consumers. Because of this incident, consumers' trusts for the store have been decreasing. Worrying about losing its customers, the company offered a free year of credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, so the customers will feel more secure. Not only Target, some other large retailers also faced the same issues. They want their customers to trust that the companies can protect private data. However, should we not worry? Data breaches have been going on for about a decade, but we have not seriously thought about the issue. In order to protect people’s privacy, the federal government should make new laws concerning companies’ handling of customer information.

The Target Corporation has undergone many changes due to the 2013 security breach where hackers stole personal information from credit and debit cards of at least 70 million customers. Target sales and reputation has dropped from this instance, thus eliciting changes in their security systems, changes in management, and a few policy changes in handling customer information. With the public eye on the corporation’s handling of the situation, Target has been communicating these changes through various means. The changes they needed to communicate were informing customers of the security breach, addressing the bad press coverage to shareholders, downsizing of employees, and

The Security breach that hit Target in 2014 was one of the worst ever. It exposed names, addresses, phone numbers, credit and debit cards information’s of 70 million customers. Target informed that all transactions and customers’ information between Nov.27 to Dec. 15 2014 were stolen on the attack by hackers. This attack affect millions and the giant store as well losing money when their sales declined to 2.5 percent. Target had to email all affected customers and help all of them with their own credit monitoring by offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection and also make them no liable to any fraudulent purchase after the breach. It was a big deal and it was all over the news. Two suggestions I would give is one, add a protocol

Michael’s Store, Inc. is an arts & crafts Retail chain. It has more than 1040 stores located in 49 US states & Canada. The company also owns and operates the Aaron brother’s retail chain, which happens to have an additional 115 stores across the Country. Michael’s store Inc. had a Security breach, which took place between May 8, 2013 and January 27, 2014. About 2.6 million cards or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period were affected. Alarmingly, its subsidiary Aaron brothers also had been breached between June 26, 2013 and February 27, 2014. It was reported that Aaron brothers had 400,000 cards impacted. The duration of the treacherous attack in total was 8 months (Schwartz, 2014). In this report, security breach of Michael’s store Inc. is analyzed. The topics covered are how the breach occurred, what did the authorities do to educate the customers & how in future such attacks can be avoided.

Online commerce was introduced to consumers in the mid-1990’s, and in the years since, it has grown exponentially. It started out virtually nonexistent and has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Nearly every retail sector has entered online commerce; clothing, electronics, home, health and grooming items, even food and groceries are starting to gain traction online. Online commerce sites rival traditional brick and mortar stores such as Walmart and Target, as well as other big-box stores. As online retailers such as Amazon continue to expand, many brick and mortar stores have been making their way online, indicative of an increasing movement towards online commerce. With more than 80% of the online population having made an online

While all of these technologies have enabled exciting changes and opportunities for businesses, they have also created a unique set of challenges for business managers. Chief among all concerns about technology is the issue of information security. It seems to be almost a weekly occurrence to see a news article about yet another breach of security and loss of sensitive data. Many people will remember high profile data breaches from companies such as T.J Maxx, Boston Market, Sports Authority, and OfficeMax. In the case of T.J. Maxx, a data breach resulted in the loss of more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers. In many of these incidents, the root cause is a lack of adequate security practices within the company. The same technologies that enable managers can also be used against them. Because of this, businesses must take appropriate steps to ensure their data remains secure and their communications remain

“Business operates in a rapidly changing internal and external environment… the society permits business to earn profit as reward for bearing risk” (Jain, T. R., Tregan, M. and Trehan, R., 2010) Within the business environment specifically Primark based in the retail sector there is always an element of risk,

The bargaining power of customers is high. First of all, the customer size is tremendous globally, which also has an accelerating growth rate in recent years. Customers’ leverage is strengthening as a result of this. Another inevitable factor is that with countless retailors online, there is low switching cost for customers to find other alternative companies that suits their desire to conduct purchases. Moreover, consumers today are more sophisticated. Consumers are less commit to impulsive-buying, yet are more willing to study about product features and evaluate their options before purchasing online. Their purchase pattern can also be hard to learn too.

Recently, Walmart bought Jet, the year-old online bulk retailer, for $3.3 billion dollars, and it was the largest deal ever for an e-commerce company (Abrams & Picker, 2016). Jet.com was known as bulking buying online store, and it was an area where Walmart.com was falling behind. However, Walmart’s e-commerce sales have stalled, and the online business grew 7 percent last quarter, but it was too slow, and the company is focusing more on its online business strategy on expanding its grocery pickup business (Abrams & Picker, 2016). Now, Walmart must manage several risks that connected the nature of e-commerce, and the risk involves security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality. Walmart management and executives must develop an effective plan to identify risks before it occur. Accordning to Turner and Weickgenannt (2013), the

The traditional retail market has been transformed by technological advances. The internet today has allowed consumers to purchase various products from home ranging from apparel to groceries. The online shopping market has grown significantly within the past decade, leading to many online e-commerce startups such as Amazon, eBay, and mobile start-ups such as Instacart. While e-commerce provides convenience for shopping, it has created major disruption to the traditional shopping industries. Traditional retailers have since faced bankruptcy due to their inability to compete with such start-ups. The traditional American toy store, Toys R Us, announced its state of bankruptcy just last month due to a significant decline in sales. More and more consumers are turning to online giants such as Amazon to purchase daily items as a result of convenience. According to the Washington Post, Toys R Us is just one of more than 300 retailers to file for bankruptcy this year, as Americans ditch the shopping mall in favor of their laptops, smartphones, and tablets (Bhattarai, 2017). Shopping which used to require walking or a vehicle trip to stores is no longer required for consumers with online shopping. Online shopping has appealed to consumers worldwide by encompassing the business aspect of service convenience which constitute saving time and/or effort (Jiang, Yang, and Jun, 2012). For consumers whom have busy lives and those whom are physically disabled, online shopping is a positive

There is a variety of risks in the hotel industry that can be divided into four main categories:

According to Peter and Tarpey (1975), the risk here can be defined into six components: financial risk, performance risk, physical risk, psychological risk, social risk and convenience risk. Consumers perceive a higher level of risk when purchasing on the Internet compared with traditional retail formats (Lee & Tan, 2003). However, not all products have the same level of risks for online shopping. Bhatnagar, Misra, and Rao (2000) found that consumers might attempt to purchase low-risk or easy-to-examine products such as books, CDs, and airline tickets by Internet more than products more complex to assess online, such as apparel. In fact, the advent of online bookshops such as Amazon has already severely damaged the profits of conventional bookstores. However, for the products of higher risk, such as apparels, it is less possible that online shopping will substitute in-store shopping. Due to the word limit, I will only examine financial risks and performance risks that I think are mostly related in online apparel shopping.

Since eBay is a huge, widely used company that is constantly in the public’s eye and has a worldwide reach, I thought it would be an adequate choice as a global transnational corporation that I would create a preparedness plan for, predicting three possible crises and appropriate responses, protocols and planned messages for each scenario. The first crisis to plague this company is that the site goes down. The second crisis is that eBay’s secret partnership with data brokers is exposed, and the final crisis is that terrorists hack into the site and cipher private member information. This essay will attempt to combat the crises and lessen the blow of actual damages inflicted to the company.

Their operations are very slick and swift such that stolen data is quickly exploited within seconds of being submitted by unsuspecting victims. Since 2005, over 400,000 databases have been compromised since 2005, and thousands more have gone unnoticed or reported. About 40 percent of those involved in IT security have no fixed figure on the number of hackings their companies have experienced. One of the rapidly increasing areas of ecommerce is in the use of web-based applications to replace traditional over-the counter transactions. Hackers have expectedly, latched on. According to a study by Gartner, over 75 percent of Internet security breaches are due to flaws and loop holes in software. The reason for this is that, applications are normally designed and put together quickly to get the system running, and no time is spend analyzing and assessing security implications. As computer hackers continue to step up their operations in line with technology advancements, the securities and future industry recorded a 150 percent increase in the number of suspicious activities detected by their systems. During the same time, research carried out at the University of Maryland indicated that a computer connected to the Internet was subject to an attempted hack every 40 seconds. The battle between ecommerce websites and consumers wages on, according to an independent analyst, ‘consumers are losing a tug of war.’ Simon Smelt, an economist who runs a survey company

Based in Seattle, Washington, iPremier a leader in online retail sales became a successful company in the internet-based commerce industry. The company retailed luxury, rare, and vintage goods online. In 2008, the company hired Mr. Bob Turley as their CIO to take their operations management to the next level. Six months into his reign, the company’s website experienced a denial of service (DoS) attack that caused chaos and confusion in the company as no contingency or disaster recovery plan existed. During this incident, it was discovered that there were no standard operating procedures to follow which lead to confusion upon the employees. Furthermore, they failed to get any form of support from the Qdata, an outsourcing hosting company that was in charge of providing internet security services, which led to a cascading of unsuccessful events in dealing with the attack. Many of the existing processes were unproductive including the escalation of the problem. This attack temporarily crippled the company’s online retail website triggering customers to contact the helpdesk. In reviewing this security breach, it is recommended that iPremier revaluate its governing values of “discipline, professionalism, commitment and partnership for achieving profits” and the corrections that ought to be implemented to prevent another occurrence of the problem that was experienced.