Introduction to Electronic-Commerce: Hidden Italy - Assignment Example

Case Study: Hidden Italy Case Study: Hidden Italy Introduction to E-Commerce The report discusses about the travel company d Hidden Italy, which is based in London. Hidden Italy provides accommodation for tourist and also gives them holiday information. Hidden Italy, being a travel company constantly need customers for running its business successfully, and therefore customer base needs to be increased on a constant note. Hidden Italy business via the e-commerce mode can also allow the firm to market their services online and also have the facility of transferring funds online (Rosen, 2000) Benefits of E-commerce and E-business The benefits of e-commerce and e-business have benefits that are reaped by both the business owners and the customers. Setting up an online business is very easy as compared to a physical set up. Further benefits of e-commerce are that opportunities for new relationships are created; customers can be facilitated 24 hours in a day, the awareness of the product and brand increases through e-commerce way of doing business. This report discusses how Hidden Italy can use e-commerce platform to boost the sales of the travel company in the travel and tourism industry. It helps towards establishing loyal customers, the margin of overall sales in business increases, profits tends to increase, operational costs have the potential to be reduced by a high margin, customers are targeted globally, becomes easier to target niche markets, and information can be delivered easily (Smith, 2001). Ecommerce way of doing business is a very feasible process to implement for all travel and tourism industries. Internet marketing techniques that should be used by Hidden Italy Hidden Italy needs customers and therefore can create constant awareness through internet marketing techniques. Internet marketing techniques that can be used by Hidden Italy are search engine optimization strategy, SEO strategy can be used via Google primarily for internet marketing, strategy of sponsored listings or CPC, social networking sites or social media marketing websites that cater a large community, recognition of brand via internet, establishing links that are related to the business and other such ways (Botha et al., 2007). There are a lot of ways through which Hidden Italy can develop their web presence. Web presence for travel and tourism industries makes the customers know the travel destinations focused by the travel firm. One of the most promising ways is to advertise it over a social networking website. A social networking website caters all sorts of economic classes and therefore potential clients can get to know about the service from the social networking website. By posting press releases regularly, the web presence can be increased drastically. By releasing press news regularly, the target market for Hidden Italy Travel Company can increase highly. Press releases allow the rankings in the search engine to improve drastically and so Hidden Italy should ensure that they launch press releases about their business regularly which includes latest information and offerings of the business to their valuable customers (E-commerce Optimization, 2011). There is another way of promoting that is through article writing in which the Hidden Italy owner write articles about their business and adds their email addresses for the readers. This promotes the website along with targeting the market segment and is highly advantageous for travel and tourism firms (Dahlen, Lange and Smith, 2009). Hidden Italy can also use search engine marketing. By this method, the website will be among the first few options when searched for the travel and tourism business and this will add to Hidden Italy’s potential clients. For this, they will have to add web content so that it appears on the first few options on a search engine (Bercherer and Halstead, 2004). Elaine can also place her website ads in classified advertisements which will filter her potential clients (Clow & Baack, 2007). Another way of marketing is by sending mass email to her potential clients. She can send them a newsletter describing her services. But this can be risky as most of the emails go into spam. Technological infrastructure required Technological infrastructure refers to the physical hardware used to connect computers and its users. Elaine, (owner of Hidden Italy Travel Company) will need a router to connect her to the internet from where she will have access to her website. The most important technological infrastructure is hosting services and domain name registration. Elaine will have to work upon getting a domain name registered by the name of her company. This would allow Elaine to use many of the hosting services such as attaining backup server, backups for email, spam filtering and email hosting services. Customers would look for company domain name while they search about the services of the organisation. Hidden Italy’s investment in technological infrastructures can allow them to reap high amount of profits. Through hosting services, reliability and security issue would have to be addressed. Other factors involves in developing a technological infrastructure is the application architecture element. Hidden Italy needs to decide upon whether the application should be server heavy or it should be client heavy. Data layers and application processing layers need to be developed and maintained. The options of cookies should be available for the purpose of security. The compatibility issues of various browsers need to be addressed (Reynolds, 2004). The factors capability, operational cost, availability and lastly price needs to be balanced when implementing technological hardware. A hosting company needs to be looked for hardware implementation as this allows the monitoring to take place always and at cost that is variable in nature. The software needed is a database that can include the entire customer base including those that are not availing Hidden Italy services anymore. It is very important for the software to be compatible with internet explorer as the market share for this explorer is around seventy percent (E-commerce Optimization, 2011). Best Practices for Promoting Website For improving the number of customers for travel and tourism firms, in this case for Hidden Italy Travel Company, it is important to cater customers that access through search engines, it is important to first conduct research by inserting the keywords that will make the user land at the website. If the website is not listed in the search results then it is important to improve content and keywords on the website so that the results come up with Hidden Italy website. The website should be user friendly and navigation should be easy for the user. The Hidden Italy website should be having the option of accepting credit cards for payment. Amazon programs as affiliates should be gained to attract more users. Hidden Italy Travel Company should promote its website based on its stronger aspects. This will set Hidden Italy apart from its competitors. It should promote on the basis of having 10 agents throughout Europe who can guide the visitors about the local settings amongst all the other travel and tourism firms. Hidden Italy Travel Company can also promote their website through Social Media Marketing such as Facebook, twitter and videos on You Tube to promote the website amongst massive online users. Fan pages can be created on such networking sites for gaining more publicity. Social online communities are in massive numbers and the numbers of users are increasing for these online communities at regular pace. Marketing on such communities allows travel and tourism organisations to generate greater number of customers for their business. They should concentrate on emphasizing over the fact on their website that they can arrange Italian hosts for the tourists in the host country. Italian hosts should be able to help them communicate with the local people in countries like Germany where the natives speak a particular language and it is difficult to get across what one wants to say (Plant, 2000) It is a better opportunity for the visitor to get adjusted to the food too. Hidden Italy Travel Company uses hosts (Italian families) who can help visitors develop their tastes and guide them to places accordingly. Because the hosts live in the visiting country they are able to tell more accurately of which places the visitor should go to and how to get there. The web site set up can be done in 8 different languages so that all the potential clients of Hidden Italy can find it useful. Hidden Italy can have customers of all nationalities and therefore multiple language websites can prove to be useful for the customers. Other than that, frequent adjustment and changes to it can also be made easily without going through a lot of monetary expenses (Ecommerce Business Journal, 2011). With this she can also add the facility of e-payment to her web site. Elaine hasn’t added this to her business yet but when she goes digital it will add value to her business. It will be easy for her clients to make transactions and can visit her website easily. The clients can go through the website and make their orders online saving both her and the clients’ time. This will also reduce her costs as she can only give the brochures to the people who are genuinely interested and the rest can get details from the website (Lamont, 2001) Benefits that these developments will give to Hidden Italy There are a lot of benefits that the travel and tourism firms will earn from having a web page and being available online. The first benefit that the development will bring to the travel firm is that it will save Elaine’s money. At present she spends a good amount over the printing of her brochures that too in 8 different languages. When it comes online it will be more approachable for the clients to choose which language they find more approachable (Reynolds, 2004). Other than that the problem she faces having to make the changes in all the brochures, annually update the accommodations, new prices etc. can be easily done if Hidden Italy is online. It’ll be easier to make corrections or any adjustments and with that it can be done more quickly rather than having to wait for funds or the brochures to get printed. The clients can conveniently transfer their money by making the payments online. This will make Hidden Italy Travel Company more convenient for the clients to use and will save their time as they will not have to personally go to the office. The benefits that these developments will bring to Hidden Italy are that operational costs will be reduced immensely, the cost of paper work will be reduced, advertising can be promoted in a cheap way than print advertising, ads made can be flexible and can be changed constantly without incurring costs such as those incurred while making changes in print ads, the relationship built with customers can be long lasting, new ways open up for building brand credibility, market research can be conducted in a cheap way, and lastly gaining feedback from customers becomes easy (Tapscott, Ticoll, and Lowy, 2000). Conclusion E-commerce way of doing business can prove to be highly profitable for Hidden Italy as it will allow Hidden Italy Travel Company to reduce the operating costs and also allow a global web presence to occur for their firm through the organisation website. Once the web site has been launched it will be easier for her to promote her travel and tourism business and she can promote the website easily through the newspapers and on the internet. The main purpose of marketing on the internet is to ensure that the business is able to generate web presence across wide horizons and Hidden Italy can accomplish this by successful internet marketing. References Bercherer, Richard C. and Halstead, Diane (2004). Characteristics and Internet Marketing Strategies of Online Auction Sellers. International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising. Vol 1 pp 24-36. Botha, J., Bothma, C. and Geldenhuys, P. (2007). Managing E-commerce. Lansdowne: Juta & Company. Clow, Kenneth E. & Baack, Donald (2007). Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications 3rd edition. Pearson Education. Dahlén, Micael, Lange, Fredrik Smith, Terry (2009). Marketing Communications: A Brand Narrative Approach. John Wiley and Sons. 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USA: CMP Books Publishing. Tapscott, Don, Ticoll, David and Lowy, Alex (2000). Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs. Great Britain: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. Read More