How to write an e-commerce graduation thesis?

[Abstract] With the rapid development of Internet technology, the application of e-commerce has penetrated into various economic fields. The combination of tourism and e-commerce has become a hot topic for people in the tourism industry in various countries. This article starts from the tourism value chain, analyzes the limitations of the traditional tourism value chain, and shows the construction of the tourism value chain and its new characteristics under the e-commerce environment, so as to provide some insights into my country's tourism informatization construction and the development of the tourism value chain. Research helps.

[Keywords] E-commerce; industrial value chain; tourism value chain

Today’s society is entering an era of network economy. The rapid development of computers and network technology has provided a new foundation for the social and economic development. The development has brought historic opportunities. The rise of e-commerce has greatly promoted innovation in various fields such as commerce, trade, marketing, finance, advertising, transportation, and education. As a result, new industries have been formed and many new opportunities have been brought to enterprises around the world. The development of e-commerce has also brought about changes in the behavior of tourism enterprises, tourism markets and tourism consumers, which has impacted or affected the traditional tourism economy and tourism enterprises.

After more than 20 years of development, our country has gradually become a world tourism power. At present, the urgent problem that my country's tourism industry needs to solve is how to improve the competitiveness of the tourism industry. The industrial value chain is currently an effective model for improving industrial competitiveness in the world. In recent years, the development trend of the tourism industry value chain has also appeared in many places in our country. With the development of modern information technology and the popularization of e-commerce applications, the use of network resources to build The tourism industry value chain has become an important research topic in my country's tourism academic circles.

1. Value chain concept

(1) Industrial value chain

The concept of value chain was first developed by Michael Porter in his book In his book "Competitive Advantage", he believes that "every enterprise is a collection of activities in the process of designing, producing, marketing, delivering and supporting its products. All these activities can be represented by a value chain . A certain level of value chain is a combination of various activities of an enterprise within a specific industry." He also believes that the core competitive advantage of an enterprise lies in the design of the value chain, and the process of value chain transmission is also the process of continuous value-added products.

Although the value chain proposed by Michael Porter is mainly aimed at the value chain within the enterprise, he also pointed out that the value chain is a series of continuously completed activities. In fact, his latecomer Peter Hines incorporated raw material suppliers and customers into the value chain, redefined the value chain as a "transportation line integrating material value", and regarded customer demand for products as the production process. end point, with profit as a by-product of meeting this goal. In addition, Haynes' value chain emphasizes the cross-functionality of basic activities, such as between technology development, production operations and markets, and classifies information technology as auxiliary activities, thus forming an industrial value chain.

The so-called industrial value chain refers to the entire process of production and processing of a final product, from the initial mineral resources or raw materials until the final product reaches the consumer. Longitudinal chain. It includes three aspects: first, the industrial value chain is a combination of related data; second, this combination is not disordered, but requires optimization and improvement around a certain core value or technology; finally, for the industry The criterion for determining whether a value chain is optimized should focus on whether the full value of its resources can be maximized. That is, the criterion for optimization is whether it focuses on "structure" and "dynamics", and its discussion object is "links" rather than "points". .

(2) Tourism value chain

According to the concept of industrial value chain, we can define the tourism value chain as a series of transmission processes of tourism products from supply to final consumption. , which is generally composed of tourism product suppliers, traditional tourism intermediaries or e-commerce tourism intermediaries, and tourism consumers.

The tourism industry value chain includes four links: tourism resources, tourism products, sales channels, and tourists. From tourism resources to tourists and back to tourism resources, the value of the value chain increases with each step, and the final value is realized by tourists. Due to increased sales, increased investment in marketing channels, products, capital, etc. has further increased the value of the tourism value chain. Therefore, we regard tourist behavior as the core and starting point of the tourism industry value chain process, and the entire value-added process can be attributed to the "demand-supply" process.

2. Analysis of the tourism industry value chain in the e-commerce environment

(1) Opportunities brought by e-commerce to the tourism industry

The term "e-commerce" It spread with the popularity of the Internet. Tourism is a labor-intensive and information technology-intensive industry. As tourism activities that are dematerialized trading commodities, the driving force for circulation in the tourism market is not commodities in material form, but the flow of tourists caused by the transmission of information about tourism products. From this perspective, the core of tourism circulation is information. The introduction of e-commerce has brought new development opportunities to the development of tourism.

E-commerce has only been used in the tourism industry for a few years, but its development momentum is very strong. E-commerce has become a new model of tourism transactions in the information age.

In 2002, global tourism e-commerce sales exceeded US$63 billion, maintaining a growth rate of over 350% for five consecutive years. According to the World Tourism Organization, tourism e-commerce will account for 25% of all global tourism transactions in the next five years, and the proportion of tourism e-commerce in e-commerce will reach 20% to 25%.

my country's tourism e-commerce websites began to appear in 1996. Up to now, there are more than 5,000 websites with certain tourism information capabilities. Among them, there are more than 300 professional tourism websites, mainly including regional websites, professional websites and travel channels of portal websites. Regional websites mainly introduce local attractions and scenery. Their overall strength is poor, the amount of information is small, and the benefits are difficult to guarantee. Professional travel websites mainly carry out travel intermediary business, including websites established by traditional travel agencies and professional e-commerce websites. The former include CYTS.com, CITS.com, etc. Kanghui Travel Agency also launched the first domestic outbound tourism website, which introduces outbound travel registration, group registration, passport, visa, border control, customs and other knowledge. Among the latter, some of the more successful ones include Ctrip.com, eLong.com, and Huaxia Travel.com.

E-commerce is an important means for my country's tourism industry to participate in international competition, and the National Tourism Administration attaches great importance to it. At the end of 2000, the National Tourism Administration launched the Golden Dragon Project. One of its important goals is to bring tourism e-commerce into the track of standardization, standardization, and systematic planning to support the electronic transformation of domestic tourism enterprises and tourist destinations.

(2) The construction of the tourism value chain by e-commerce

1. Traditional tourism value chain

The tourism industry is an industry characterized by related collaboration. The traditional tourism value chain starts from tourism destination suppliers, passes through tourism wholesalers, and then is sold by tourism retailers to tourists in source areas (Figure 1).

As can be seen from Figure 1, the tourism value chain can be divided into three parts. The entire value chain is block-shaped, and each block is linear in order. Independently operated commercial tourism agencies are the main body of the value chain. Various tourism activities are coordinated by tourists, travel agencies, travel wholesalers, local travel agents, travel intermediaries and tourism service companies at the destination, and the entire process has a fixed sequence, which is indispensable and cannot be reversed or jumped. This leads to slow information flow and poor program flexibility in the traditional tourism value chain. This is a fixed chain connected in sequence, just like a biological chain. If a link in the middle is interrupted, the entire chain will disintegrate.

The right branch of the traditional tourism value chain, that is, the main part of the value chain composed of commercial tourism institutions, mainly focuses on the conclusion of tourism product transactions, and is less concerned about the provision of destination tourism information. On the contrary, the branch on the left, that is, the part composed of destination agencies, is mainly responsible for the provision of destination tourism information and does not care about tourism transactions. The two parts are clearly separate and rarely cooperate or interact with each other. Tourism is an industry with a large gap between production, supply and consumption. On the one hand, tourism consumers do not understand the tourism products and services provided by tourism companies; on the other hand, tourism companies do not understand the needs of tourism consumers. This means that This results in information asymmetry and information delays.

2. Construction of the tourism value chain under the e-commerce environment

The development of the network economy has redefined the connotation and form of competition and cooperation in each link of the tourism value chain. Jefferey F.Rayport and John J.Sviolda proposed the perspective of developing virtual value chains in 1995, believing that every enterprise today competes in two worlds, namely the physical world that managers can perceive and the virtual world composed of information. The latter refers to e-commerce, a new value growth point. The value-added processes of the two value chains are basically different. The physical value chain is composed of a series of linear and continuous activities. The virtual value chain is non-linear, has potential input and output points, and can be obtained and distributed through various channels. . The e-commerce of the tourism industry has had a huge impact on the traditional value chain between enterprises. While a large number of direct sales websites for tourist destinations have been established, a number of emerging e-tourism intermediaries and professional tourism e-commerce platform websites have emerged. The new tourism value chain uses computer network technology as the platform and the Internet as the medium, overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional value chain (Figure 2).

The e-commerce environment promotes the networking of the tourism value chain. It is distributed in a network with the tourism e-commerce platform and the tourism destination information system as the center. There is no obvious sequence. Each part of the entire chain can cross. links, information transmission speed is fast and loss is low.

Among them, tourists, tourism e-commerce platforms, tourist destination information systems and other five node parts all have direct connections, turning the linear information flow in the past into one centered on the above three parts. Star-shaped structure (Figure 3).

While overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional value chain, the new tourism value chain also shows some new characteristics:

(1) Dynamic cooperation

In the new tourism value chain, each node can reach its destination node through multiple ways. Therefore, it is a challenge for every tourism enterprise to find the "ideal" partner and maintain a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship with the high-speed flow of information.

Obviously, most cooperative relationships in the information space are holistic, using information circulation as a bridge to find the lowest-cost partner, and the cooperative relationship can only be maintained until the goals of both parties are achieved. Therefore, each enterprise will continue to "shuttle" in the information space, looking for the right partnership, the right time, the right market segments and market conditions.

The effective selection of partners directly affects the value added of the tourism value chain. The coordination theory is used to analyze the dependence between enterprises, and from the perspective of the overall optimization of the one-way tourism value chain, a method is proposed A method of selecting partner portfolios based on interdependence, thereby improving compatibility and stability of nodes in the tourism value chain.

(2) Product customization

With the intervention of e-commerce, tourists or potential tourists can adjust relevant information according to their own personal interests and choose personalized tourism products. For tourism companies, they can obtain more and more comprehensive tourist market information than ever before, adjust the products sold and services provided, and provide customized tourism products for specific tourists, thus promoting various innovations in marketing and sales. For example: In the traditional tourism value chain, if tourists want to travel to a certain tourist destination, they must go through a travel agency, travel wholesaler or some tourism organizations. Otherwise, tourists cannot directly understand the tourist destination information and can only choose The travel products provided by travel agencies, the entire travel activity is a package service. In an e-commerce environment, tourists can learn about destination information through professional tourism platforms and tourism destination information systems, choose their favorite projects, split and reorganize the products provided by travel agencies, and experience an ordering service. .

(3) Diversified competition

In the e-commerce environment, the high-speed circulation of information has made competition among tourism companies more intense. From the original competition for tourists to the current competition for information and tourists , market and other factors, and the dynamic nature of cooperation has intensified this phenomenon.

At the same time, e-commerce has also blurred the boundaries of the value chain, and competition may also come from outside the value chain. In addition to obtaining benefits in the value chain, some surrounding related companies may also establish new product and service flows through the Internet. The Internet is not only a channel to directly connect customers or value chain participants, but also a source of enhancing their competitiveness.

3. Conclusion

At present, the new tourism value chain in the e-commerce environment is only in the exploration and development stage. Only when tourism companies at each node in the value chain cooperate openly with each other, establish a dynamically balanced business value chain model, and improve their core competitiveness can they truly make profits and open up a successful market in an environment where information spreads rapidly.

At the same time, the tourism industry is an industry that relies heavily on information. The introduction of e-commerce has made the communication of information barrier-free and lossless a reality. This has caused many tourism companies to believe that information is benefit and regard information as The process of acquisition is equivalent to the process of benefit. In fact, the transmission of tourism business interests is far less smooth than the transmission of network information. The acquisition of tourism business interests is a complex and huge process, a process of highly refined information, and a process of coordinated development dominated by multiple factors. Therefore, we should also look at the e-commerce of the tourism industry rationally.