E-BUSINESS STRATEGIES AND SOLUTIONS
Objective: This chapter deals with the existing business strategies in E-Commerce. At the end of this chapter, the students should be able to develop a simple e-business planning process, and a strategic solution.
In today's highly competitive business environment, budget-oriented planning or forecast-based planning methods are insufficient for a large corporation to survive and prosper. The firm must engage in strategic planning that clearly defines objectives and assesses both the internal and external situation to formulate strategy, implement the strategy, evaluate the progress, and make adjustments as necessary to stay on track. Below is a simplified strategic planning diagram.
Strategic Planning Steps
Mission and Objectives
The mission statement describes the company's business vision, including the unchanging values and purpose of the firm and forward-looking visionary goals that guide the pursuit of future opportunities.
Guided by the business vision, the firm's leaders can define measurable financial and strategic objectives. Financial objectives involve measures such as sales targets and earnings growth. Strategic objectives are related to the firm's business position, and may include measures such as market share and reputation.
Environmental scan
The environmental scan includes the following components:
internal analysis of the firm
Analysis of the firm's industry
External macroenvironment
The internal analysis can identify the firm's strengths and weaknesses and the external analysis reveals opportunities and threats. A profile of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is generated by means of a SWOT analysis. (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
An industry analysis can be performed using a framework developed by Michael Porter known as Porter's five forces. This framework evaluates entry barriers, suppliers, customers, substitute products, and industry rivalry.
Strategy Formulation
Given the information from the environmental scan, the firm should match its strengths to the opportunities that it has identified, while addressing its weaknesses and external threats.
To attain superior profitability, the firm seeks to develop a competitive advantage over its rivals. A competitive advantage can be based on cost or differentiation.
Strategy Implementation
The selected strategy is implemented by means of programs, budgets, and procedures. Implementation involves organization of the firm's resources and motivation of the staff to achieve objectives.
The way in which the strategy is implemented can have a significant impact on whether it will be successful. In a large company, those who implement the strategy likely will be different people from those who formulated it. For this reason, care must be taken to communicate the strategy and the reasoning behind it. Otherwise, the implementation might not succeed if the strategy is misunderstood or if lower-level managers resist its implementation because they do not understand why the particular strategy was selected.
Evaluation & Control
The implementation of the strategy must be monitored and adjustments made as needed. Evaluation and control consists of the following steps:
Define parameters to be measured.
Define target values for those parameters.
Perform measurements.
Compare measured results to the pre-defined standard.
Make necessary changes.
E-BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
Tips and techniques to a better e-business solution:
I. an e-mail address.
II. promote your business.
III. a good name for your website, URL.
IV. a website.
V. get people to visit your website.
VI. Customer Relations Management (CRM)
VII. register with search engines
VIII. get statistics about visits to your website
IX. get an evaluation of the efficiency of your website.
X. improve your website.
XI. prepare for e-commerce taxes.
I. E-Mail
To conduct electronic business successfully the first thing you need is an e-mail address. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will offer you one for free or for a modest fee. However, the e-mail address that you want my already be taken. You need an address that is unique worldwide. So it may take some searching and compromising to find one for you.
Occasionally, you may want to change your provider of e-mail services. For instance, you may not like the advertisements that go with a free address. If you are a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) you can get an e-mail alias. This means that you can keep that address when you change providers. It also means that your e- mail will be routed through the IEEE server, for example, which offers an extra firewall against viruses.
II. Promotion
As with all business and commerce you will have to promote your e-business and e- commerce. You can use all conventional means, ways and media. However, certain aspects are specific and you have to consider them.
Some users and authorities take a dim view of so-called scamming, i.e. flooding users with unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) messages. There are already laws prohibiting such activities and others are in the works.
The use of equipment that automatically calls a series of telephone numbers and leaves recorded messages is also considered annoying.
:::.
III. Universal Resource Locator, URL
The URL is the address of your website. It consists of
IV. Website
The next step is to create a website and put contents on its pages. When you surf the web you will see all kinds of WebPages, one fancier than the other. Do not fall for the temptation to make fancy WebPages. You are not out to win a webpage award. You want to sell your products and services. Make sure that advertisements for the products and services of others do not overwhelm the promotion of your own products and services.
Avoid using dark backgrounds - in particular black - for text, which will then be hard to read. Do not use a small font that is difficult to read. Backgrounds and pictures will also slow down the downloading of pages. Your potential costumers and clients may give up before they get to the promotion of your goods. Keep your WebPages simple!
Make sure that the contents of your website can be displayed and printed without scrolling left or right. You may have noticed that text to the right of a site does not print. You do not want this to happen to your site.
Websites are written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), in one of its versions, or in similar languages like the Extended Markup Language (XML). You want to write your website in a language that most browsers can read, like the basic HTML. A
browser is a computer program that reads the contents of websites. The Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Mozilla Firefox are examples.
There are HTML editors like the Microsoft FrontPage and Netscape's Composer that automatically write in HTML. Thus, you do not have to learn HTML, even though it is recommended. Knowing some HTML lets you edit your webpage content. There are simple books like the 10 Minute Guide to HTML.
You want your customers and clients to be able to register and to communicate with you to order your products and services, and to pay for them by credit cards, etc. - all from the website. For that you need one or several fill-in forms on your website. You can arrange to have the filled in information sent bye-mail to any e-mail address of your choice. You can read about how to create them in manuals and help-files. Also ask your ISP regarding fill-in forms.
If you select a free or low fee website and/or e-mail server, the ISP may restrict the sizes of your e-mail and the number of website hits. Make sure that you agree to the ISP's rules.
You can also have your own e-mail and website servers. To start you only need ~ something like a Microsoft NT or 2000 Server.
V. Increasing Hits and Traffic
It is essential that your potential customers and clients visit your website to be exposed to your promotional efforts. There are several ways to increase the traffic to your website.
1. Use a Title of your site that conveys what you offer. Search engines look for Titles and direct surfers to your site depending on the text in the Title.
2. Use META KEYWORDS in the head of your HTML text. For example: - This is another kind of text that search engines look for. However, do not overdo your META -files. Some search engines are programmed to reject WebPages that are considered being designed to manipulate search results.
3. Add a META Description Tag to describe your site for the search engines. Sample:
4. Register your website with search engines. You can do this individually with each engine, or you can use services that do it for you. With several thousand search engines in use worldwide, registering with all of them is a chore.
Yahoo! has an extensive website that tells you how to suggest a website to them. Go to http://howto.yahoo.com/chapters/lO/a.html and click on Suggesting a Site.
VI. Customer Relations Management (CRM)
You have the option to encourage people to correspond with you by e-mail. To get replies by e-mail, you need to post your e-mail address on your website, and/or have forms for replies, comments, ordering, etc. You should encourage people to give you their e-mail address.
People will also reply by telephone and fax. If you expect any reasonable number of phone calls you will need a Call Center. A more up-to-date name is Contact Center. Because customers and clients will contact you by voice, fax and e-mail, you will need a Contact Center that handles all kinds of contacts. Information about the caller, including history, e- mails, faxes, etc. should be displayed to your customer representative at the same time that he/she takes a call.
VII. Register with Search Engines
Listing with some ten of the top search engines should give you good enough service. Among the top engines are All the Web (Fast), AltaVista, AOL, Excite, Go.com, Google, HotBot, Lycos, Microsoft's MSN, Netscape, NorthernLight, WhatYouSeek and Yahoo!. Note that rankings differ with the ranking criteria used.
To reach them try websites that offer listings, such as Open Directory, WebCrawler, etc. You can also list directly with each search engine.
VIII. Hit Statistics
You need to know how successful your website is, i.e. the number of people that visit it and what they are looking at. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer hit counters. Ask your ISP how to install a counter. They are all different.
A hit counter typically displays the number of previous visitors. If you do not want your visitors to know that number, there are programs that send the information to you only. Other programs give you the number of hits for each page of your site.
Several programs that track hits are available. They will report the number of hits per page, the referring search engine, the domain name of the visitors, etc. Among such programs are HitBox and WebPosition.
IX. Evaluate the Efficiency of Your Web site
You should evaluate the efficiency of your website. This can be measured in the number of hits, as stated in Section VIII. above. The amount of purchases, the listings by search engines, etc. are also part of the efficiency. Continuously make sure that your site does not have any dead links, that browsers will find it, that download times are reasonable, etc. There are services that evaluate the efficiency of your website, some for free. Try ProBooster, ProBoostGold and WebPosition.
X. Improve your website
Use all the information you have collected to improve on your website.
XI. Prepare for E-Commerce Taxes
Governments are always looking for things that can be taxed. E-commerce is no exemption. However, there are also strong oppositions to taxing e-commerce. Some jurisdictions are levying taxes on e-commerce, others are not. Some are payable by sellers, others by users and third parties.
No comments:
Post a Comment