Abstract
There are many e-commerce startup success stories such as Facebook (the closing case) and Alibaba (Case 16.2), among others. However, failure can constitute a large part of entrepreneurship. According to di Stefano (2010), over 70 % of online businesses fail within 10 years. I Am Hungry is not a success story and the company is not in operation any longer. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned from the creative Web 2.0 project.
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Glossary
- Angel investor
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A wealthy individual who contributes personal funds and possibly advice at the earliest stage of business development usually in exchange of equity in the business.
- Attractors
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Websites that include puzzles, competitions, and prize giveaways. They are designed so that visitors will like them so much that they will visit again, and recommend the site to their friends.
- Business model
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The manner in which business is done to generate revenue and create value.
- Business plan
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A written, formal document that specifies a company’s goals, and outlines how the company intends to achieve these goals.
- Business case
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A document that is used to convince management to approve the investment of organizational resources in specific EC or other projects.
- Collaborative website
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A website that allows business partners to interact and collaborate (i.e., it includes many supportive tools).
- Content management
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The process of collecting, publishing, revising, updating, and removing content from a website to keep content fresh, accurate, compelling, and credible.
- Crowdfunding
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A funding method based on using investors to fund startups. Each individual invests a small amount of money; the collection channels are Internet-based social networks.
- Cross-selling
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Offering complementary or related products and services to increase sales.
- Domain name
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A name-based address (owned by a person or an organization) that identifies a specific website and its Internet-connected server.
- Dynamic Web content
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Frequently changing content that continuously needs to be kept up-to-date.
- EC incubator
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A company, university, or nonprofit organization that supports promising EC businesses in their initial stages of development.
- Information architecture
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How a site is organized. It lists all the components of a site and how they are connected together.
- Informational website
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A website that provides mostly information about the business and its products and services.
- Interactive website
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A website that provides opportunities for the customers and the business to interact converse and present information (as in information website).
- Self-hosting
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When a business acquires the hardware, software, staff, and dedicated telecommunications services necessary to set up and then manage its own website.
- Site navigation
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Aids that help visitors quickly and easily find the information they need on a website.
- Social-oriented website
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A site that provides users online tools for communication and sharing information on common interests.
- Storebuilder service
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A service that provides Web hosting as well as storage space, templates, and other services to help small businesses build a website expeditiously and inexpensively.
- Transactional website
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A website that sells products and services.
- Up-selling
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Offering an upgraded version of the product in order to boost sales and profit.
- Usability (of a website)
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Refers to how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals. It also refers to how satisfied users are with that process. It measures the quality of a user’s experience when interacting with a product or system.
- Venture capital (VC)
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Money invested in a business by an individual, a group of individuals (venture capitalists), or a funding company in exchange for equity in the business.
- Web content
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Content (the text, images, sound, and video) that is included on a Web page.
- Web hosting service
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A type of hosting service that allows individual and organizations to make their website accessible on the Web (providing websites with space on the Internet).
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Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J.K., Liang, TP., Turban, D.C. (2015). Launching a Successful Online Business and EC Projects. In: Electronic Commerce. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10091-3_16
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