Introduction

This project is part of the recommended activities to be done in the ISORG coursework. The area to cover is on e-commerce Transaction Broker. The goal of the transaction broker is to facilitate the buying and selling of products and services between the buyers and sellers and to provide convenience and good prices to its users. An e-commerce transaction broker can be an individual or firm which operate virtually and earns the commissions from every successful online transaction.

We will be researching on the leading travel agent in the virtual market, ZUJI.com. We explored and will discuss its purpose, features and strength, weakness and pitfall, security and privacy in the following. This will give us a better idea on what is a transaction broker.

Purposes

ZUJI is an online travel agent dedicated to bringing great value travel choices to travelers in Asia Pacific. ZUJI is part of the Travelocity family of companies globally and owned by Sabre Holdings, a world leader in travel commerce.

The website enable consumers to have a choice of more than 400 airlines, 60000 hotels, thousands of care hire, activities, attractions as well as travel insurance to travelers.

The website not only allow communication with their consumers; it also enables their team to have closer relationship with suppliers all over the world and that results in great travel deals for the travelers.

Features and Strength

ZUJI, a notable travel agent in the virtual market operates in a B-2-C business model. Consumers can now book tickets at their convenience. Not only it deals with flight promotion but also distribute other valuable information, which travelers may need, in their travel.

Such as hotels, car hire, insurance and travel extras. This allows travelers to book everything they need in a single website. This cross-promotion method not only helps in expanding customer base between these partners, but also an inexpensive marketing tool that benefit both parties.



For the budget travelers, ZUJI has a friendly interface that lists out all the prices offered by each airline to the same location. This facilitates the time usage and hassle for users in comparing the prices.

While on the other hand, consumers who preferred to choose to travel with their favourite carrier, can also narrow their search by clicking on the airline and a list of destination will be generated out.
ZUJI collaboration with hotels and airlines is able to generate attractive packages (Flight and hotel), using its community’s purchasing pattern to meet the users’ needs, travelers can enjoy greater savings and eliminate the trouble to find hotels on their own.

The website is easy to navigate and it is wise to display attractive offers on the homepage, to attract consumers and keep them interested.

Sitemap is included to aid users to locate information faster, should they have trouble in getting the information they need. ZUJI grouped the entities in term of the category they belong to. Example under Latest Promotions, they have ‘Weekly Travel Promotions’, ‘ZUJI Reverse Auction’, ‘Vote for $1 Travel Deals Everyday on ZUJI’ and etc. Also, when all things failed, there is a hotline support at the customer service link. This encourages consumer to deal with confidence.

Users can also share information and read reviews by travelers on their past experience with ZUJI. This will result in a deep relationships being formed between customers and will help in inducing them to visit the site more often in order to keep in touch with one another. However, sometimes this will lead to problem instead, this will be elaborated at the Weakness and Pitfall section.

The Activities section is where user can find the suggested activities to do in each country (E.g. Grand Canyon Tour in America). Booking is also available should user wish to add it to their itinerary.

Weaknesses and Pitfall

Even though ZUJI provides variety of airlines and hotels booking, there are some weaknesses and pitfall about ZUJI.

To keep up with the trend of being a user on social networking sites, most companies registered themselves as a user on Facebook. This is nothing new to ZUJI. ZUJI enables traveler to post comment and allow traveler to interact with user. However, receiving review about ZUJI can be pros and cons. Good comments can lead to receiving more business and improve the company revenue whereas bad comments will lead traveler to have a second thought before deciding to plan their holiday with ZUJI.

On top of that, if traveler is to do any last minute flight booking, the site will show an error message and telling traveler to try again later. In comparison, Tiger airways or Jetstar airways provides last minute flight booking for the actual day or following day, selection for actual day booking is able to proceed. To improve on the flight booking system, perhaps ZUJI can display a page that shows no flight is available on the actual day instead of just displaying an error message.

Main concern with ZUJI is that sometime the site has technical glitches when purchasing for a ticket or reservation for hotel room. Upon providing the credit card details, the site will direct traveler to confirmation page which traveler is able to print out. However when technical glitch appears, the confirmation page didn’t show as how it should, traveler is unsure of whether to refresh the page nor click back / stop buttons as it will interrupt the transaction. Therefore the greatest concern for traveler is what if the system had debited the credit card for the purchase but never issue the traveler a ticket or making a reservation. Traveler will have to contact ZUJI’s customer service hotline for clarification. This will affect the reputation of the reputable company.

Privacy

The site includes a Privacy Policy page that allows traveler to know about the use of personal information that is being collected.

ZUJI and/or ZUJI Travel Pte Ltd. is the owner of the information collected on this site. ZUJI does not sell or rent individual personal information to third parties. However, ZUJI may disclose traveler personal information on occasion to third parties who work with ZUJI. Some of these third parties may be located outside home country, for example, in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan Brunei and the US.

1. Disclosure of the information will also be made in the following scenarios: After successfully completion of travel reservations or purchases at ZUJI, personal information will be provided to the authorized third party (hotels, car rental agencies or other third parties) by ZUJI.
   
2. To continually improve on the site, ZUJI may employ the services of third party companies to perform projects such as market research survey which requires travelers’ personal information.
3. When required by the law to disclose the information

Security

A website which involves transaction and sensitive data will require a robust and secured system. Zuji.com registered itself with various security services such as VeriSign and TrustSg to gain confidence in consumers to complete a transaction successfully.

Not only that, TTG has awarded ZUJI the best travel agency in Asia Pacific for the fourth time. It has successfully proven its capabilities and allows consumers to trust it for their travels.


All in all, an e-commerce transaction broker not only needs a user-friendly interface but also requires a system to pass various stress tests in order to handle high volume of visitors and be ready for any error handling.