Developing Expertise in E-Commerce: A Content Analysis of Students' Knowledge of Online Auctions

Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2005 by Foster, Jonathan, Lin, Angela

4.2 Process Knowledge

With propositional knowledge providing students with the conceptual and analytical tools to understand the nature of their e-commerce experience, the exercise also provided students with the opportunity to acquire process skills for completing a successful e-business transaction (see Fig.3). The most frequently cited categories of process knowledge were: dealing with transactions (21%), marketing (19%), and evaluation (18%). Other significant categories included market opportunity analysis (13%), process knowledge access to propositional knowledge (i.e. sentences referring to the ability to access and use lecture-based concepts in a real-world context of application) (9.5%), and negotiation (9%).

Some students also regarded communication, e.g. writing a product description for the goods on sale, as a difficult yet important skill. The challenge here was to write a product description within the word limit that described the product precisely, and which at the same time would make the product attractive to potential buyers. Many students did not possess such a skill prior to the exercise and felt the task was challenging although rewarding. One student who failed to sell her item in eBay UK but successfully sold another item in Yahoo Taiwan felt that failing to sell her jacket in eBay UK was in part due to the language barrier.

Asking sellers appropriate questions and dealing with enquiries from potential buyers swiftly were also regarded as important. Students said that a speedy response and friendly communication from a seller form a part of their evaluation of the seller's integrity and honesty. In this case, asking sellers questions about the item was indeed to 'test' the sellers' trustworthiness. Some students felt that communicating with sellers prior to bidding builds a relationship with the seller and subsequently makes it easier to negotiate a discount once their bids are successful. Since the students were also in the position of being a buyer, they recognised the importance of communication with buyers. They argued that swift and speedy response to any inquiries by potential buyers will help to increase their perceived trustworthiness and improve their perceived customer service. Although negotiation skills were perceived to be important, depending on the type of C2C platforms used, not all the students felt they acquired such skills during the exercise. For example, those who purchased or sold a book in Amazon.co.uk's second-hand book marketspace did not feel that they had an opportunity or needed to negotiate with sellers or buyers because the price is fixed and Amazon handles the payment. Nevertheless, those who used eBay to trade expressed that basic negotiation skills were acquired. Most students agreed on their acquisition of evaluation skills from doing the assignment. Students stated that they learned about evaluating goods according to its description, price, and picture provided by sellers. They also stated that they learned about how to interpret feedback from sellers (most of them focused on the seller's reputation and few mentioned the buyer's reputation). Students also learned about evaluating market conditions with the help of theoretical frameworks e.g. number of sellers selling the same or similar items. A further evaluation skill identified, one that was not expected at the outset of the study, was the students' ability to examine and evaluate their own actions. This skill was in fact acquired through writing the reflective report that asked students to explicitly and critically evaluate their experiences consciously. In so doing, students were able to reflect and learn from their experiences. A final point worth making is that 9.5% of sentences contained content that we chose to categorize as 'process knowledge access to prepositional knowledge'. This category was assigned to statements that indicated a successful application of the principles and concepts from lectures to the task at hand e.g. "several concepts and frameworks that were taught in class were used to evaluate different murkelspaees and platforms" (student 40), and "this experience has allowed for [...] the ability to apply the knowledge to real life examples" (student 40). In the context of our aim of enabling an effective bridge to be made between the classroom and business practice, this was for us a distinctive category to note.