Selling Culture: Implementation of e-Commerce and WAP-based Prototypes
📝 Abstract
Museum stores represent integral parts of the museums that have also a lot to benefit from a successful presence on the web arena. In addition to traditional web sites, carefully designed electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites may increase the potential of museum stores offering possibilities for on-line shopping and other commercial functions. In parallel, the recent convergence of the traditionally separate technologies of the Internet and mobile telephony has brought the concept of ‘wireless Internet’ into the spotlight. Within this context, ‘mobile commerce’ (m-commerce) is a relatively new trend that represents a natural extension of e-commerce into the wireless world. M-commerce refers to electronic business transactions and differentiates from e-commerce since it involves the use of mobile devices and wireless medium rather than wired. The unique characteristics of mobile computing bring forward new challenges and opportunities for museum stores. This article presents the design and implementation of an e-commerce and an m-commerce museum shop application. The aim is to evaluate and compare the two applications in terms of several parameters, such as available technologies, strengths and limitations, design requirements, usability, interaction speed, usage cost, etc and also to identify ways for enhancing the potential of such applications and designing successful and profitable business models.
💡 Analysis
Museum stores represent integral parts of the museums that have also a lot to benefit from a successful presence on the web arena. In addition to traditional web sites, carefully designed electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites may increase the potential of museum stores offering possibilities for on-line shopping and other commercial functions. In parallel, the recent convergence of the traditionally separate technologies of the Internet and mobile telephony has brought the concept of ‘wireless Internet’ into the spotlight. Within this context, ‘mobile commerce’ (m-commerce) is a relatively new trend that represents a natural extension of e-commerce into the wireless world. M-commerce refers to electronic business transactions and differentiates from e-commerce since it involves the use of mobile devices and wireless medium rather than wired. The unique characteristics of mobile computing bring forward new challenges and opportunities for museum stores. This article presents the design and implementation of an e-commerce and an m-commerce museum shop application. The aim is to evaluate and compare the two applications in terms of several parameters, such as available technologies, strengths and limitations, design requirements, usability, interaction speed, usage cost, etc and also to identify ways for enhancing the potential of such applications and designing successful and profitable business models.
📄 Content
Selling Culture: Implementation of e-Commerce and WAP-based Prototypes
Konstantina Zafeiri1 and Damianos Gavalas2, Aikaterini Balla3
Abstract – Museum stores represent integral parts of the museums that have also a lot to benefit from a successful presence on the web arena. In addition to traditional web sites, carefully designed electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites may increase the potential of museum stores offering possibilities for on-line shopping and other commercial functions. In parallel, the recent convergence of the traditionally separate technologies of the Internet and mobile telephony has brought the concept of ‘wireless Internet’ into the spotlight. Within this context, ‘mobile commerce’ (m-commerce) is a relatively new trend that represents a natural extension of e- commerce into the wireless world. M-commerce refers to electronic business transactions and differentiates from e-commerce since it involves the use of mobile devices and wireless medium rather than wired. The unique characteristics of mobile computing bring forward new challenges and opportunities for museum stores. This article presents the design and implementation of an e- commerce and an m-commerce museum shop application. The aim is to evaluate and compare the two applications in terms of several parameters, such as available technologies, strengths and limitations, design requirements, usability, interaction speed, usage cost, etc and also to identify ways for enhancing the potential of such applications and designing successful and profitable business models.
Keywords: Museum shop, e-commerce, m-commerce, wireless Internet, WAP.
I. Introduction Museums, at the most basic level, provide homes for objects. The range is vast, yet each object is linked by a conscious decision made on its behalf to be preserved, classified and displayed. Museum souvenirs solidify and materialize the experience of the visit. In turn, the museum store often features as souvenirs representative ‘star exhibits’ to immortalize and summarize the experience for the visitor. The visitor in the museum store, like the tourist, “is a consumer away from home” [1]. Museum shops are integral parts of modern museums and in fact have become a destination within museums. As opposed to the often monolithic, overtly didactic and somewhat threatening impression given by the museum itself, museum shops offer space for marketing and commercial exploitation. Shops’ exhibits represent the contents of the museum, but in a manner that is accessible. The products of a museum shop have a different meaning and importance from any other shop product and represent an attempt to substitute cultural objects [1]. The success and popularity of the Internet and the web provides museum organizations an ideal medium for communication, documentation, promotion, advertisement and marketing. Museum shops have also a lot to benefit from a successful presence on the web ground. In addition to traditional web sites, carefully designed electronic commerce (e-commerce) sites may increase the potential of museum shops. The term e- commerce refers to any commercial exchange (delivery or transaction) of information, goods, services, and payments between entities (physical or not) over telecommunications networks [2]. Usually, e-commerce is connected with shopping and sale of information, products or services. E-commerce activities include establishing and maintaining online relationships between an organization and its suppliers, dealers, customers and other agents related to (or in support of) traditional delivery channels. Other activities include product searches and comparisons by consumers, product information presentation and promotion by manufacturers and retailers, post-purchase customer support, communication between seller and shippers or banks and other activities that are not directly related to the transaction itself. In the context of museums, the possibilities of on-line shopping and other commercial ventures, such a ticketing and digital image libraries organization, reveal new commercial potentials for museum shops. In particular with new technologies, the space of the museum shop has extended beyond that of a physical and tangible realm. With the Internet, the world’s most pervasive and gratuitous consumer marketplace, the museum shop has found itself an electronic home in several incarnations. Almost all museum web pages have links to their own private online shops and for many of that, with these online resources, it is no longer necessary to even visit the actual museum.
Beyond the “traditional” e-commerce, a new type of commerce is growing in the last decade, the mobile commerce (m-commerce). Taking into consideration the tremendous growth in mobile telephony and the evolution of the handheld devices, technologies and applications are beginning to focus more on mobile c
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