Web Technologies for Commerce and Services Online

Citation

Probets, S. (2010), "Web Technologies for Commerce and Services Online", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 28 No. 4, pp. 727-728. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378831011096402

Web Technologies for Commerce and Services Online presents recent research into human, social and organisational factors that influence the adoption of e‐business in a wide range of organisational settings. The book consists of 17 chapters, each concentrating on a specific topic. A number of chapters consider issues that affect business‐to‐business (B2B) transactions, whilst other chapters concentrate on issues affecting online transactions with consumers (B2C). Among the wide range of topics discussed throughout the book are chapters concentrating on the impact of business to business e‐commerce on inter‐organisational relationships; digitising business relationships; techniques to structure electronic catalogues of products; the effect of third‐party assurance seals or privacy policies on consumer trust; an investigation into whether the gender of small business owners affects the degree of e‐commerce adoption; and the relative importance of frequent versus infrequent customers. A number of other topics are also discussed. Although slightly more of the chapters focus on issues affecting B2C relationships, taken together the chapters cover an appropriate and interesting range of issues. The book takes a global perspective, with many of the chapters presenting studies from a range of countries among them the USA, Sweden, Korea and China.

All chapters are written as academic papers with clear research questions, methodologies and findings. Although there are no obvious methodological weaknesses in the chapters, a constant question that arises with any publication of this kind is whether the review process for the chapters is as rigorous as for comparable peer‐reviewed academic journals; however, in all cases both the methods and samples used are clearly indicated, and any limitations arising from the methods or samples used are outlined in the chapters. Many, though not all, of the chapters report on quantitative statistical approaches to address the hypotheses and research questions; consequently, some readers may wish for more methodological variety leading to more qualitative discussion and richer analysis of the intricacies of some of the findings.

The topics discussed in the chapters are wide‐ranging and cover a broad spectrum of issues relevant to e‐business and e‐commerce. Students and researchers with an interest in factors affecting the adoption and effectiveness of e‐business will find considerable value in a number of the chapters. One drawback of the book is that it consists of an unordered collection of chapters and would benefit from collecting these chapters into coherent sections arranged around a particular theme. A small number of the chapters have been previously published in the Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organisations; nonetheless, the findings reported in many of the chapters will be of genuine interest to e‐business and e‐commerce researchers.