Other Way of Making Business: A Virtual e-Commerce
Community / CVN Platform
Roberto Naranjo, Jorge Moreno, Luz Marina Sierra, Martha Mendoza
Researcher Information Technologies Group (GTI), University of Cauca, Sector de
Tul
can Popayan, Colombia South America
Abstract. This article describes the current problem in the business
environment from the department of Cauca – Colombia (South America), and
the proposed solution called Project CVN (Spanish initials) “Business Virtual
Community - for the department of Cauca - Internet Commercial Platform or
BVC”. Based on a markets research, the architecture of the added value
conceived by the project is described; these values support advertising,
collaboration, B2C, and B2B, activities framed within the virtual environment
of the community. Below, the business model proposed for the community and
the logic architecture of the software is described. Lastly the experiences and
the learnt lessons throughout the implementation of the project are exposed.
1 Introduction
CVN is a Research [12] University [1] and Enterprise [4] cooperation initiative,
which adapts the IT (Information Technologies) to the specific commercial needs of
the department of Cauca (Colombia). Three aspects of the problem stand out: firstly,
the lack of the associability and collaboration among the enterprises; secondly, the
distance between costumer and enterprise on account of the deterioration of the
communication channels, and finally, the unawareness about the advantages of the
use of the IT [1]. There are similar initiatives in Colombia, among others, such as:
Plaza Orbita [l5] (Orbital Market) that attempts to promote products and services of
the city of Medellin (Colombia); De Remate [6], Latin-American leader selling
products through auctions, and TAMPU [7] focused on promoting the tourist image
of city of Popayán and department of Cauca region (Colombia). Facing the mentioned
initiatives, CVN proposes a business concept that brings together the region
enterprises, through a virtual environment that offers added value services directed to
the
advertising, the B2C (Business to Consumer) and B2B (Business to Business), as
an alternative to the suggested problem. The CVN will benefit cultural and
technological conditions that motivate the associativity and collaboration among
enterprises, as well as the formulation of strategies for the promotion of products and
services that benefit the effective approach of these enterprises with their customers.
Naranjo R., Moreno J., Marina Sierra L. and Mendoza M. (2005).
Other Way of Making Business: A Virtual e-Commerce Community / CVN Platform.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computer Supported Activity Coordination, pages 141-148
DOI: 10.5220/0002567501410148
Copyright
c
SciTePress
2 Project Development
CVN has been developed as a project in different stages, from the conception of the
research idea, going through the markets research, the elicitation of the requirements
and the harmonization of the service outline, up to the design of the logical
architecture of the software, the business model view and the sustainability –
continuity strategies. These stages are described as follow:
2.1 Markets Research
The carried-out markets research intended, first to identify and quantify the regional
and national supply - demand over product-services supported on the CIT [9] through
the CVN, and second, to establish profiles and entrepreneurial tendencies, that allows
identifying opportunities and threats of the environment with the purpose of designing
commercialization and sensibilization strategies of the transactions through the
Internet.
2.1.1 Hypothesis
The following hypotheses were proposed for the markets research:
1. There is an unsatisfied Internet service and E-Commerce demand in the department
of Cauca.
2. There is a lack of knowledge of the business, opportunities, and risks derive from
the commercialization through Internet in the department of Cauca.
3. There are limitations and/or technical-economical barriers in the department of
Cauca that oppose the commercialization through the Internet.
4. Inexistence of Internet integral solution offers and electronic commerce in the
department of Cauca.
2.1.2 Execution
The critical needs of information identified to validate the hypotheses during the
execution of the markets research, were:
1. To validate the execution of the project with the evidence that there are enough
enterprises which request an E-Commerce alternative such as CVN.
2. To identify the treats and opportunities of the project from a study of the current
use of the CIT (Communication and Information Technologies).
3. Finally, to estimate the supply of products and services and its possibilities of
commercialization on a national or international market.
2.1.3 Technical Specifications and Sample
The complete sample consisted on productive enterprises and associations from the
department of Cauca with a regional, national and international coverage. The sample
consisted on 54 enterprises of 12 different business areas. The type of sampling was
“Non probabilistic”.
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2.1.4 Conclusions of the Markets Research
The conclusions of the research, allowed the designing of the service portfolio and the
elicitation of the technical and functional requirements of the CVN. The markets
research has focused its study and subsequent conclusions on aspects related to the
Internet, specifically: use, experience, problems, shopping, sale, associability,
advertising, interest, and/or conditions of entrepreneurial participation in the
execution of CVN project. Here, here are some of the main conclusions found:
The enterprises need a technological platform that permits the association among
them.
The enterprises guess that the CVN is an important E-Commerce project that will
permit them to offer an integral solution of products at the costumers and
advertising through the association among the entrepreneurial members of the
community.
Increased sales, improved knowledge of the market, improved costumer service,
achievement discounts by amount of purchase, among others are the main reasons
that the association of their relationships will bring to entrepreneurial members of
the community.
The CVN added value services platform will allow the entrepreneurial members of
the community to promote and to sell their products and/or services on a national
and/or international market.
There are favorable conditions for the execution, continuity, and sustainability of
the CVN, in each one of the aspects mentioned above.
3 A Business Model
The business model [11] of the CVN relies on two basic parts: A service model [9]
and a sustainability model. Together, they will allow the start up of the CVN as an E-
Commerce platform. These two concepts are explained briefly below.
3.1 A Service Model
The service model is conformed by three components: Publicity and collaboration
component, B2C Component and B2B Component.
3.1.1 Advertising and Collaboration Component.
Also called “Advertising and Collaboration Virtual Environment”, it is responsible of
supporting the approaching between the enterprises and their customers through
stimulus strategies related to the promotion of products/services and the cooperation
and information interchange among the enterprises. The main on-line services that
this component offers are: catalogues of products and services, personalized
consumption profiles, search engine, adds, information about events, supply and
demand of products and services, information managing, and chats moderated by
experts.
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3.1.2 B2C Component
Also called “B2C Virtual Environment”, it is responsible of supporting the
communication channel between costumers and enterprises, it provides the following
on-line services: Shopping Cart, Information recovery and analysis according to the
customer’s shopping habits, and auctions-drop/auctions among users of the
community. CVN will offer an evaluation of the quality for every service provided.
3.1.3 B2B Component
Also called “B2B Virtual Environment”, it is responsible of supporting the
cooperation among enterprises with the purpose of promoting a higher power of the
entrepreneurial negotiation, the acquisition of better prices through on-line value
services, the addition of the supply/demand of products-services and finally, provides
commercial information from Popayán.
3.2 Sustainability Model
It defines the valued cost over the provision of the services of the CVN that will allow
in a long term, to guarantee the sustainability of the community (over five years).
Two income sources are proposed: the first one consists of memberships that are
obtained by those people or customers whom interest is to actively participate in the
CVN, and the second one consists of the selling of added valued services that through
the profit of the commercial information provide the enterprises with competitive
advantages that impulse the capacities of negotiation and communication. CVN
proposes 3 kinds of memberships for the users according to their needs. These
memberships have been defined according to the identified needs in the markets
research (see Number 2.1).
3.2.1 Free Entrepreneurial Membership
This one allows access to the CVN platform for the entrepreneurial members of the
community, in order to show them basic services such as: yellow pages,
Entrepreneurial Webpage, search about products and services of the CVN,
participation in auctions, and drop auctions, among others.
3.2.2 Standard Entrepreneurial Membership
This one allows to the entrepreneurial members of the community, to have access to
added valued services such as: electronic chats lead by specialists, Evaluation
information gathering that the Customers do about the enterprises on aspects related
with: Products and Services, client service, fulfillment and support post-selling;
configuration of integral solutions of services for costumers, among others.
3.2.3 Plus Entrepreneurial Membership
Additionally to the free and standard subscription services, this one includes on line
support, addition of the supply/demand service for major suppliers and customers,
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configuration of integral solutions of services for costumers, and inter-entrepreneurial
purchasing orders value, among others.
The second sustainability source, relates to the selling of the added value services
such as: advertising (Banners among others), branding, direct and crossed marketing,
promotions and customers fidelization strategies that are the result of applied data
mining strategies to the CVN platform. Having in mind the offered services and the
entrepreneurial interest in participating in CVN, a presentation of the subscriptions
behavior in the first year (see fig 1) was carried out as well as a projection of the
community utilities in the first five years (see fig 2), in this one we can see that it is
evident that in the two first years the community does not present utilities due to the
high initial costs that implies to start it, however the outlook improves considerably,
after the second year.
Jan fe b ma
r
Ap
r
ma
y
jun Jul
y
Au
g
Se
pt
oct no
v
De
c
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
Subscriptions the First Year
Free
Standard
Complete
Month
Number of Subscriptions
Fig. 1. Number of subscription for the first year
1 2 3 4 5
-50,000,000
-40,000,000
-30,000,000
-20,000,000
-10,000,000
0
10,000,000
20,000,000
30,000,000
40,000,000
50,000,000
60,000,000
70,000,000
80,000,000
90,000,000
Utility per y ea r (Pesos)
Utility
Year
Pesos
Fig. 2. Five years forward
4 A Software Architecture for the CVN Platform
CVN offers a technological platform that permits to support the services model
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mentioned above. Fig.3 shows the logical architecture of the CVN, (it was modeled
using the UML Language [16]). This diagram specifically shows the domain layer
(following the Application-Domain-Services Architectural Pattern [8]). In this paper
we only explain the main software classes that implement some services in the virtual
environment of the CVN platform, such as: product/services catalogue, shopping cart,
orders, subscriptions, stands, among others.
4.1 Access Control Package
The main purpose of this one consists of providing all those services related to
member’s access control rules e.g.: user accounts creation and its maintaining, CVN’s
services assignment based on a membership model and other commercial
considerations.
Fig. 3. CVN software architecture
4.2 Shopping Cart Package
The main purpose of this consists of providing all those services related to remove
and store items (here are products and/or services) from and to the shopping cart and
the buy order making based on the shopping cart content and others.
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4.3 Products and Services Catalogue
The main purpose of this package consists of providing all those services related to
facilitate the search and retrieve of structured information from the products and
services catalogue, making products and services requests and getting prices, too.
5 Conclusions
Despite the difficult conditions of violence and ground communication in Cauca,
CVN proposes an alternative concept of promoting and commercializing the products
and services in Cauca, encouraging, at the same time, through added value services,
the asociativity and collaboration among entrepreneurial members of the community,
profiting the initial conditions to consolidate, throughout a virtual environment, an
agreement point among enterprises and customers, and finally promoting alternative
communication channels. From the Basic aspects in the advance and development of
CVN outstands the markets research that allowed dimensioning the expectation of the
services that had to be offered to the community; at the same time, it was outlined the
strategy of releasing them. Further more the CVN has conceived the mechanisms of
sustainability and its future regulation in the frame of the Colombian legislation
during its start up.
It is important to emphasize the technological support that the CIT offers like
support (internet, communication protocols, standardization, software development
tools, among others) to the CVN and the maturity level that CIT has at this moment;
in addition, there are very good software development tools such as Microsoft .NET
Framework and IDEs that offer many benefits in order to develop this kind of E-
Commerce platforms. This technological support, finally allows us to contribute in the
fortification of the communications channels between enterprises and between
enterprise-costumers.
We hope the CVN platform will be turned into a business alternative to Cauca
since it counts with a higher availability of the businessmen of the region, a software
tool adapted to the requirements of the Cauca region, and an adequate sensibilization
that shows the competitive advantages of the usage of the CIT, will guarantee the
successful starting up of the CVN.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank COLCIENCIAS [12], UNIVERSIDAD OF CAUCA [13],
CYGNUS TECNOLOGY ENTERPRISE [4], who permitted the development this
project and HEXUM Digital Media [14], for supporting in web design.
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