Conduct Environmental Analysis
Introduction
E-commerce strategies have totally revolutionized the conservative concept of business. It is the selling and purchasing of goods and services through the use of internet technology and computer networks. Computers and mobile phones with internet connectivity are the basic tools required for online transactions these days. Any person with basic knowledge of internet and computers can work with business skills of e-commerce applications. Online payments are easy and quick. Security is a major concern but one has to act wisely and logically before going for any purchase as it involves money. Replacements and returns are easy and there are many lucrative offers to attract customers. In this study, we discuss various pros and cons of e-commerce industry and the ease and difficulties that people face while shopping online.
Task 1 – Refer attached spreadsheet.
Task 2
1.ConductEnvironmental Analysis of Some Ecommerce Solution along with Potential for Global E-business and focus on Value Prepositions, Core Competencies and Market and Trend Analysis
E-commerce is a generic term which is proposed for the websites that run over the internet. Such websites mainly deal with some kind of international business operation or cashless commercial transaction and involve a lot of information transfer over the internet. E-commerce websites range from normal shopping cart to consumer retail sites, music or auction sites to some kind of business exchanges which might deal with the trading of goods and services between organizations and co-operations.
Figure 2: Steps within an e-commerce process
SWOT Analysis of E-commerce Website:
SWOT is short for strength, opportunity, weakness and threat.
Competitors, changes in the environment, law and regulations, rapid innovations in products and services, privacy concerns, no direct interaction with customers, fraud in transactions and risk are some of the major threats to global e-commerce industry.
E-commerce is so fast and effective, financial transactions can be made from anywhere in the world.People feel more comfortable to shop online and thus it is an opportunity for software people and internet marketers to create a new innovative application that caters to the basic needs of the customers. Such applications have not bound any kind of global and local boundaries. In addition, to this advertising is inexpensive in online mode as compared to local sellers. Thus, there is huge scope for sellers who mark their presence online.
Some generic advantages of e-commerce:
- It allows consumers to exchange goods and services 24 hours, 7 days a week with no barriers howsoever of time and distance. One prerequisite for using an e-commerce website is to have internet connectivity and a device such as a computer or mobile phone from which the website can be accessed. Payment is not an issue with e-commerce websites, as the consumer can opt for cash on delivery option and pay when he receives the product in hand. Now you do not have to consume fuel and make an extra effort to go to the shopping complex, mall or retail store. You can shop at your convenience from the comfort of your home.
- Another major advantage of e-commerce applications is that you can opt for faster delivery options. Next day delivery, two-day delivery or standard delivery (4-6 days) and can relax.
- You get to select from wide variety of products. You can pick and choose from various colors, size, shapes, fabric, flavors, smell and odors all under one roof.
- You can purchase the product, pay for it via debit / credit card or net banking options. In case you don’t want to pay online, you can choose for paying after you receive the product (cash on delivery option)
- Although you do not get your product right away and you cannot try it before going for purchase, still you can return your product if you do not like it, or the size does not fit in the case of apparel and footwear. Off-course returns are not acceptable in the case of perishable items like food products and grocery items. In the case of returns you get your money back in your account. In other cases, you may get replacements and cashback coupons. Isn’t that amazing?
- There are attractive price cuts, discounts, and coupons available online which are not always available when you go to retail outlets in person. You get lured to shop more and save more.
- You can shop from various available categories men, women, kids, infants and babies. Filters are available to shop according to age, size, price range, new arrivals, best sellers, discounts, name, top rated, brands, availability, colors and shop for (girl, boy, unisex in the case of apparels and footwear).
- You can track your order via the website
- You can check your order history and can reorder the same products again in any quantity
- Chat with customer care executives in case you have doubts regarding the product, delivery, quality or website. You can notify them about your address changes and phone number
- You also get to earn loyalty cash with some websites, which can be redeemed for cash on your next purchase
Read more about e- commerce Business model
Some disadvantages of e-commerce:
- Sometimes your courier / parcel may get lost on the way and you may not be able to track it.
- In some cases the e-commerce websites might be fake, your money might get debited from your account and it might now reach the retailer and get lost on the way. This is often the case when retailers use non-secure internet connection.(Networksolutions, 2015)
For the success of any business over the internet, it must make its presence felt in retail outlets first. This is often the case with most B2C businesses these days. B2B refers to the business between one business and another and B2B refers to business between one business and consumer. Businesses goals have to deal with thousands of consumers and suppliers daily. Handling them is often very difficult. Having an online presence eases out this work and also provides a competitive advantage over the traditional methods of transaction. E-commerce is faster, cheaper and more convenient if it is implemented properly.
Such e-commerce transactions are not new. They have been around the corner for more than 10 years now. Earlier they were in the form of electronic data interchange which allowed each customer and supplier to set up a dedicated link between them and then proceed with the transactions.
Ecommerce websites need to have targeted shopping strategy to drive customer traffic towards their website. Special discounts, festival offers, seasonal discounts, anniversary and birthday offers etc must be a part of a campaign that drives people towards shopping from your site. If any customer goes happy and satisfied from your site then there are more chances that s/he will come again for shopping.
It is not easy to earn money overnight from an e-commerce website. This is a learning process management and you must keep your competitors in mind before taking any step. You must constantly strive to improve your website, in accordance with changing trends, technologies which will enable customers in better decision making.(Anon, 2015)
Estimation of your e-commerce presence in terms ofPorter’s competitive forces model
There is a need to consider Porter’s competitive forces model as SWOT analysis does not consider market realities into consideration.
(Vuylsteke and Fraser, 2011)
The threat of new entrants means how easy it is for the new competitors to enter the market and compete.
Substitution / Substitutes – How easily substitutes are available and how easily options are available.
Supplier Power – Are suppliers able to drive up the cost?
Buyer Power-Is the buyer powerful enough to drive down prices?
Rivalry – Is the market competitive enough?(Build My Online Store, 2013)
What does our proposed system do?
Our proposed e-commerce model pertains to online appointment system in medical practice. This system allows us to search for the list of doctors and allows us to fix up appointments with them. There is directory listing of doctors according to fields such as diabetes, neurology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, cardiology etc. There is the facility to search for a particular doctor. A list of doctor name, specialty, clinical address and timings gets displayed. We can search a doctor by his name or by his specialty and department. Alternatively, we also have the option to view the complete comprehensive list of doctors present in our medical facility. Users have the facility to add an appointment via this website. Name, the reason for appointment, address, date of birth, department of doctor and doctor’s name has to be submitted. In case the appointment is confirmed, the user has to pay the consultation fees. Upon successful submission of consultation fees, s/he will be granted a receipt for an appointment.
2. Illustrate the implementation of strategic Goals and Objectives in your organization
Providing optimal medical facilities to the patients within budget is the main goal and vision of our medical organization. Our objective is to treat every patient with 100% accuracy rate.Keeping this view in mind, we have the facility of medical billing and medical scheduling. The process is so accurate and efficient that patients are fully satisfied and there are 30 % more chances that they will come back and like to have these services all over again, not for the sake of emergency or necessity but for experiencing this comfort again.
There are facilities for searching, online appointment, searching for the list of appropriate doctor, patient registration, reimbursement management, patient statement and collections, reports and analysis and claim scrubbing in the organization / medical office as well as over the website.
Even if the patient or his attendants are not able to go to the medical facility to collect the reports, he can just login into the website and generate his reports which are uploaded by the doctors over the website.
Medical practitioners have given the facility of scrubbing the claims for the patient’s by verifying and producing all the information and uploading them online. This will, in turn, ease out the process of getting the claims for the medical expenses in case the person carries some policy.
Managing multiple reimbursements is easy and quick in our organization and the same facility can be availed via our website.
3. Discuss the expectations of customers from this website and how well this merges with the aims and goals of the website and organization.
Customers are attracted by the simplicity and ease of navigation of this website which gets in a friendly way with the organizational aims and objectives. Some of the basic medical procedures and practices followed in this website are:
- It is easy to search for the doctors of particular department as patients can search them by name as well as by departments name
- Patients can book their appointments with the doctors online. In this case, they have to pay online to get in touch with the doctors.
- Capturing patient’s demographics (when patient fills patient information chart, his complete details including name, contact number, address, employer details and insurance associated are taken)
- Schedule activities / appointments (staff is able to schedule and manage upcoming patient visit and
- Perform billing tasks and generate reports (Automatically scrub claims against a list of 10 million federal, state and commercial claims edits. Handles multi-physician, multi-day or multi-office schedules. Reduce no shows to about 30 % per day)
- Preserve list of insurance payors / Claims and statements (In case a patient carries a valid public or private insurance policy, at the time when these services were provided then these charges are sent as an insurance claim. In other cases CMS 1500 form can be utilized via which the medical charges can be sent to the insurance company and claim can be filed)
- Reports (You can request for reports based on your credentials and demographics. This acts as a record when you go for medical treatment personally)
This website is essentially medical practice management software which is suited for small to medium sized offices. This software can even work as desktop only, client-server or internet based software.(NueMD, 2015)
4. Describe the e-commerce Business Model that you have used in building this solution
Majorly there are 7 types of business models that eCommerce businesses follow:
- Business to Business(B2B)
- Business to Consumer(B2C)
- Consumer to Consumer(C2C)
- Consumer to Business(C2B)
- Business to Government(B2G)
- Government to Business (G2B)
- Government to Citizen (G2C)
In my solution, I have followed B2C as e-commerce business model. B2C is short for business to customer. In this model, a business sells its product directly to the customer and there is no intermediary in between. The end customer is able to view the products on the website of the business organization. A customer can select the product of his choice and place an order. Email notification via the website will go to the corresponding business organization which will, in turn, dispatch the product to him.
Figure 8: overB2C
In my proposed solution, I have made use of B2C business model, in which a customer can select from the wide range of products avail to the website and place an order. There are a number of payment options available -cash on delivery, debit / credit card, net banking, pay wallet, pay and PayPal. The customer can select any of the given options and complete his purchase.
5. Discuss Potential Risks in development of this solution
Along with many advantages of e-commerce there are many risks involved with it as well.
- Many websites does not make use of secure payment gateways, due to which customer’s credentials can be cheated and they may fall prey to frauds.
- E-commerce websites are internet dependent and thus, they cannot work in the absence of internet connection. Website’s performance is affected by the speed of internet, slow network speed, system crashes and virus attacks etc.
- Ecommerce websites need to keep a backup of their online data so that they may be able to recover from sudden disaster and server down problems.
- They need to keep their license updated to face any legal issues firmly.
- Customers can face difficulties in the absence of proper return policies. They might purchase the product online but the product might not appear same as the image available on the website. In such case, they might want to return the product, but if the website admin refuses to accept it back or might change return policy then it is the loss of customer, who invested money in buying that product.
Such kind of practices needs to be stopped immediately if marketers wish to run their business online successfully, as a happy and satisfied customer will spread the word online and this may go on. A word of mouth is more powerful than any kind of advertising.
In our example of medical office appropriate and legal payment gateways are provided on the website, which makes use of SSL (Secured layer) via which payment information is transmitted and any kind of frauds can be avoided. Here, customers, are the patient’s themselves and doctors interact with them directly via the website. No third party is involved in between and patients are the end users.
Task 3
- Use the assigned URL supplied to you by your Course Leader to commence the first steps in familiarizing yourself with Joomla as a content management system and to develop a preliminary prototype of your proposed e-commerce website. (State the URL in the first part of the report)
URL of website: http://u1071840.cloudaccess.host/
- Using Cloudaccess.net
- Created account
- Installing Joomla
- Confirmed email for backend access
- Joomla is one of the popular software across the world which is used to manage, organize and publish content for websites. It provides an added advantage to the blogs, content writing, and content for web and mobile applications. Once MVC architecture is owned it is also very helpful in web development.
The website is designed for a medical practice. For that, a new template name has been used and a banner related to theme has been uploaded. Website logo also designed for the new template.
Posted a new article in the Article section of Joomla Backend and made it feature so that it can come up at the front page.
- List all the Joomla! components and features you are likely to use for Assignment 4 and explain briefly why each component/feature will be used (see a selection of Joomla! features below on the next page).
Using Components
- Kunena forum will be used to make a discussion forum where users can discuss website functionality or service
- Blog section: A blog section will be created with the help of component where we will give a brief idea about our services and products.
- J2 store V3 core will be used as an e-commerce component. It will help in posting products, categories. Component will also be used for add to cart and checkout functionality
- Breezing forms component will be used to make contact us page
- Adding polls
Modules
- Will use default login modules for user registration and sign-in process.
- Working with other modules
- J2 store adds to cart module will be used
- J2 store recent product module will be used
- Banner will be used to put slider image which will give an instant idea about product and services.
- We will use mainly youtube tutorial from BuildAJoomlaWebsite channel for creating this website. (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAgbMBkD1VPDQspCl2tzhSw)
This is one of best tutorial available for beginners.
Joomla extension will be used information regarding new components and modules available. On the website, all the modules and components will be free and verified by Joomla extension.
Conclusion
Businesses these days have to make use of technologies to perform business activities. The need for internationalizing business activities in sync with technological development is highly in demand, in order to keep the business stay ahead in the market. Businesses are making use of digital technology these days to remain competitive. E-commerce has emerged as an effective medium by which businesses have got a platform to display its offerings in front of the customers and end users. E-business is the new talk of the town, which not only helps to develop business activities but also helps in advertising products and services successfully.
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