Week5

Q7. 

The first questionable condition is the ‘Next’ right to alter or amend credit charges, to withdraw credit, to accept or reject orders, to refuse applications, or with prior notice, to close an account. It does not give details under what conditions that right can be applied.  Another questionable condition is the right to make searches at credit reference agencies when customer opens account. There are many payment options such as direct debit, online banking, by check or by debit or credit bank. The service charge is 25.99% APR!!!! which is just rip-off. It gives the right to return items in a variety of way: returning to a store, by courier (quite reasonable price 3.99£) or by post. Customer has to confirm in writing or call if he/she wants to close an account. In my opinion this is unnecessary inconvenience for customers and could be simple be done using the Internet.

The competitors terms and condition are comparable. The advantage is they are not so restricted in terms of opening an account as ‘Next’ terms and conditions.

Q8.

The registration process on the http://www.next.co.uk uses secure connection. TLS v1.0 256 bit AES (1024 bit RSA/SHA) is used as a encyption protocol and rsaEncryption as a public key algorithm. Security certificate is issued by Akamai Subordinate CA 3, Akamai Technologies Inc for Next PLC and expires on 21/04/2013 04:59:00 GMT.

Encyption is the process of converting information into an encrypted form, so that it is intelligible only to someone who know how to ‘decrypt’ it to obtain the original message[1].

 Q9.

The site http://www.next.co.uk uses cookies which can be seen in the screenshot below:

A cookie is a piece of data stored n a specially designated cache in a Web browser[2].Cookies serve many purposes on the Web, such as selecting display mode, maintaining shopping cars selection, and storing user identification data. Privacy or lack thereof is one of the main concerns about cookies. Cookies allow Web server to track a user’s browsing behavior[3].

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn270.pdf

[2] ‘Cache cookies for browser authentication’, A.Juels, M. Jakobsson, T.N. Jagatic, Security and Privacy, 2006 IEEE Symposium on, 21-24 May 2006

[3] ‘Secure cookies on the Web’, J.S. Park, Internet Computing, IEEE, Jul/Aug 2000

Week3

Q1. The www.next.co.uk website description 

The website provides information about products that are available for customers. The website looks professional and the design is up-to-date with the current technologies (below).There are some links that divides products into a few  categories such as: women, man, girls or boys (below) that make easier for users to move on the website.

The search textbox that allows to search for specific products is placed in the middle at the top part of the page. The link to customers’ account login is well placed at the top of the page (below) among the other useful links such as ‘Find a store’ or ‘Help’.

Customers have easy access to their basket in the right corner of the page and can see the value of the basket at any time (below).

Q2. Size of the business

The company employs 58706 workers(in 2011).  The Next PLC  share price went up from 22.37£ in April 2011 to the current price 30.32£ [1]. The Next brand operations see the annual turnover of more than 3.4bn£ [2]. Net profit of the company before tax is listed below[3]:

Profit before tax: 2012  –  570 £m, 2011 –  543 £m,  2010 –  505£m,  2009 –  429 £m, 2008 -498 £m,   2007  –  478 £m,  2006  – 449 £m,  2005 –  424 £m,   2004  –  358 £m, 2003 – 301 £m

Q3. Business’ channels

The company distributes through two channels:  Next Retail, a chain of more than 500 stores in the UK and Eire and  Next Directory, a home shopping catalogue and Website with three million customers. The company operating online business through Next Directory accounts for 32% of group sales and 44% of operating profits [3].

References:

[1] www.bloomberg.com

[2] www. http://citywire.co.uk

[3] http://www.nextplc.co.uk/