Saying the day is fast approaching when nearly all products are available for purchase online, Boston University professor Vijay Kanabar said yesterday at the Center for English Language and Orientation Programs building.
“Pretty soon you will be able to buy everything online. … It’s pretty interesting what is happening in e-commerce. People were trying to sell their kidneys on eBay until the government made it illegal,” Kanabar said, laughing.
He explained the four different types of online business sites. Respectively, eBay and Napster exemplify consumer to consumer e-commerce, while Amazon.com is an example of a business to consumer site. Monster.com is a consumer to business site. Fruit of The Loom’s site is an illustration of business to business e-commerce, meaning it is a site on which “we click and click and click and click and still we cannot buy,” Kanabar said.
Business to business sites rake in around $1 trillion yearly, though Kanabar said business to consumer e-companies are more prevalent and widely known, but account for only $15 billion in annual revenue.
Kanabar also discussed various technological aspects of e-commerce, including a briefing on the buzzword “middleware” — the operations between client and server — and how to look up other buzzwords online, through webopedia.com.
Concluding his presentation with some basic HTML programming knowledge, Kanabar talked about domain names and recounted how, “for four years I was trying to get kanabar.com but some guy in London had it and finally two years ago he gave it up and I have been having kanabar.com ever since.”
He said the domain name “altavista.com” cost the company $1.7 million, but he bought ‘kanabar.com’ and ‘vijaykanabar.com’ from registry.com for significantly less.
Kanabar has doctoral degrees in Management and Information Systems, and has taught for 22 years at various American universities, including the last two years at BU as an associate professor in Metropolitan College.
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