E-commerace of Marks & Spencer - Essay Example

In the essay, we shall examine four aspects of e-commerce that have been incorporated by Mark and Spencer (M&S). These areas are; Online selling, Security, Collaborative Commerce and Stock control. The essay will focus on reasons that triggered adoption of E-commerce by (M&S). After the expansion of the European Union, there were more retailers that entered the UK market. This meant that M&S was now facing renewed competition from the new entrants and had to incorporate changes to deal with this competition.

The Company needed a source of knowledge on what consumers need and it also needed to do outsourcing. These two objectives were met through ecommerce and now the Company is ahead of its new European competitors. (M&S Annual report, 2007) The Company has adopted this mode of operation because the world is becoming increasingly global; this implies that there are more and more people doing business with parties that are quite distant from them. E-commerce therefore helps Marks and Spencer to reach customers that are not in the UK.

This is especially useful to the Company because it has numerous stores world wide. E-commerce has affected the speed at which transactions are made because it is very fast. Before the introduction of online selling, customers had to go manually to M&S yet some of them were very far from them or were even out of the country. Companies that had already . aused M&S to adopt online selling so that it can get feedback from consumers, conduct business quickly and efficiently and improve quality of service to its customers.

Another market force that caused the Company to adopt this ecommerce strategy was the fact that the Company was spending a lot of its resources on advertisements. It also had to do a lot to become popular. Ecommerce has therefore provided an affordable mean of advertisement for the company, expanded markets for the Company by reaching a large audience that could not have been accessed before through ordinary mean of advertisement. (M&S Annual report, 2007)Social pressuresThe Company adopted this strategy because there were many changes in customer preferences and it needed to keep up with these changes.

Besides, it was responding to the increased availability of knowledge among consumers. Availability of knowledge to consumers meant that they needed to know a lot of background information about a Company and its products before they can buy it. E-commerce was the tool which could respond to this demand. It has allowed M&S to exchange information with consumers through 'blogs' and 'comments' section on their website. Thus customers can now have their questions answered and can also participate in innovations made by the Company.

(M&S Annual report, 2007)2) SecurityTechnological pressuresWith increased technological advancements and internet availability, it is possible for people to teach themselves all the skills necessary in a particular trade. This means that someone can pose as a representative for M&S and tell a customer everything they expect to hear yet they had nothing to do with the Company and may be fraudsters. It therefore became necessary for the retail Company to install security