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Keeping e-Secrets

By Stanley P. Jaskiewicz
What secrets could an e-commerce firm have? An online business is exactly that: online, always, and always available to anyone with an Internet connection. Inventory, pricing and marketing are all on the Web site for anyone to see ' whether a potential customer, or a potential or actual competitor.

Yet, as with their bricks-and-mortar counterparts, the story of how an e-business gets online hides many secrets. Just as the success of retail behemoths may lie in wringing costs out of the supply chain ' by getting the best deals from suppliers, and cutting logistics costs ranging from inbound shipping to even the shortest storage to quick distribution ' e-commerce firms face the same challenges to distinguish themselves from competitors worldwide. Some online firms may even have truly proprietary technology. Similarly, the e-analog to the real-estate-bound business of real-world stores is the effort required to find the best locations to attract customers in the always-evolving world of marketing online, whether sophisticated search-engine advertising and linking strategies are being used, or if the business is simply selecting and defending a good domain name.

In fact, e-commerce and tech firms face constant threats to secrecy and challenges unheard of by their real-world predecessors. Today, for example, businesses that work with data about individuals, whether that data is a record of credit-card transactions or is housed in more complex medical databases, must comply with complex burdens to maintain the confidentiality of the people to whom the data pertains. As the many recent headlines about privacy breaches reveal, protecting against the risk ' and cost ' of worldwide criminals' vigilance to gain instant access to that data must be as much a part of any e-commerce firm's business plan as its marketing strategy.

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