Browsing by Author "Zhang, Liang"

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Business model analysis for online social shopping companies. Case study: RunToShop Oy.
(2009) Zhang, Liang
School of Economics | Master's thesis
Online social shopping is a new business model emerging in E-Commerce world and becoming quite popular in recent years. Online social-shopping website is where people can recommend their favorite products for others to discover and purchase online. Online social shopping combines Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumers and Consumers-to-Consumers services together and blends two powerful elements of real-world shopping otherwise lost for online consumers: word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted sources and the ability to browse products in the way that naturally leads to discovery. Attracted by the market perspective of online social shopping, many start-ups have entered in the market in recent years. In addition, some large Internet media companies have seen the potential in the market and tend to take a share of the market, such as Amazon’s aStore. The goal of this study is to analyze the business model of the case company and compare its business model with its selected main competitors’ (namely YELP, Kaboodle, and Zlio) in order to find out the success factors for an online social shopping company in the fiercer competition. The research framework is adapted from Osterwalder’s business model framework. Qualitative research methods, e.g. case study and interviews, are applied in this research. RunToShop Oy, the first Finnish social shopping company is the case company of this study. According to the business models analysis, YELP’s unique business model which emphasizes on providing localized reviews in USA has achieved great success in the USA market. Kaboodle’s business model which focuses on facilitating online shopping for consumers makes it very popular among young females so that it is acquired by Hearst as an online marketing channel in May 2008. Zlio’s business model which aims at building the largest sales forces in the world with high commissions rewards seems not to be accepted in the market. Its aggressive money making business model causes problems in trust from consumers and conflicts with its business partners. RunToShop’s business model would like to bring personality and trust which are missing in online shopping. At the beginning of the business development, the biggest challenge for RunToShop is how to attract more users in order to build up an active and loyal online community. Based on the lessons learnt from the selected International competitors, some managerial recommendations are made to RunToShop’s management team. It is important to propose a unique value proposition according to the actual needs of consumers. Startups should consider focusing on niche market in order to gain competitive advantages over International competitors. It is critical to focus on developing an active local community and encouraging the loyalty and trust. Maintaining good relationship with business partners is a key to success. The revenue model should be carefully designed to get as many revenue streams as possible in order to make good profits. Fast International expansion does not always guarantee success so it should be considered only after the business model is accepted in the local market.
Improving Business Process Resilience to Long-tailed Business Events via Low-code
(2022-09-16) Zhu, Jingwei; Peng, Jun; Zhang, Liang; Truong, Linh
A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
Among different types of changes, a specific type named long-tailed change (LTC), induced by wide-spectrum and sporadic events (hereafter long-tailed business events (LBEs), poses fresh challenges to available change management solutions in business process management. The disorder in economic and social life caused by the competition of COVID-19 epidemics and countermeasures all over the world fully demonstrates the impact of this new change management problem. Based on the principle of separation of concerns, this paper proposes a systematic framework to solve the above problem. The solution consists of a low-code mechanism for process adaptation and business policy conformance. As a result, front-line practitioners can quickly react to changes by using a domain-specific language (DSL) while a corresponding verification of functional and non-functional attributes maintains compliance with business constraints. We validate the solution through a case study of an e-commerce scenario during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On-the-fly collaboration for legacy business process systems in an open service environment
(2019-07-01) Ye, Lin; Zhu, Biqi; Hu, Chenglong; Zhang, Liang; Truong, Hong Linh
A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
Dynamic, distributed and open business forces enterprises to support various critical requirements, such as, timely reacting to changes, properly reusing business assets and smoothly collaborating with external partners. Existing approaches focus on mechanisms dealing with heterogeneity, but there is a lack of frameworks enabling legacy business processes performing collaboration in an open service environment. This paper proposes the L2L service framework featuring reactive IoT event messaging and coordinator-based collaborating between autonomous enterprises. Along with the emerging of coordinators, L2L empowers on-the-fly business process collaboration with dynamic changes. We present our experiments with a real-world scenario from the shipping industry of China.
Resilience and Elasticity for Continuous Service-based Processes in Pandemic Ages
(2021) Truong, Linh; Zhang, Liang
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
COVID-19 has turned service-based business continuity into a hot issue, due to the survival of enterprises under long-tailed changes of business caused by various abnormal socioeconomic events and disruptions. We analyze how current techniques enable small and medium enterprises to be resilient and elastic. From observations of service disruptions during COVID-19 and problems with current technologies for resilience and elasticity, we recommend addressing resilience and elasticity requirements through contextual service information and hybrid services coordination programming and serving.