E-Commerce Website Review - Assignment Example

E-Commerce Task Website http www.easyjet.com/ Aims and objectives: The following are the various aims and objectives of the Easy Jet website: 1. The primary objective is making profit by online selling and attracting customers with low cost model. 2. Allows one to select the language at the very onset of the homepage to proceed further (see appendix 1) 3. Offers a range of services to the customers like flight booking, hotels, holidays, car rentals and others. 4. It also offers travel insurance, airport parking, Ski breaks and lots of others. 5. An array of various services from cab services to and from the hotel and other services. 6. One can book flights and associated services with the use of credit card and pay in various ranges of currencies for ease. 7. It offers one to create an account and add their photograph and other verifiable details for proof. Website 2: http://www.britishairways.com/ Aims and objectives: The following are the various aims and objectives of the British Airways website: 1. It allows one to select their domicile website for catering of various countries and their customers in their own language and currency (see appendix 2) 2. It offers a variety of fights to nearly all locations in the world and requires credit information for purchase of tickets. 3. It offers a section called “Manage my Booking” for regulating the various associated services like edit of credit card details, journey details, departure details and so on. 4. It offers a striking feature namely the “Information” services section to offer variety of services for all range of customers. 5. The customer support email and phone numbers make sure that all the various customer grievances are taken care for their well being and better management. 6. It also offers executive club memberships which allow one to manage their frequent flier objectives, managing their company accounts, providing enough offers and promotion objectives. Website 3: http://www.malasiaairlines.com/ Aims and objectives: The following are the various aims and objectives of the Malaysia Airlines website: 1. Its primary objective is to allow customers to book flights (see appendix 3) 2. It offers packages for individuals, corporate and governments and many other institutions for access and delivery. 3. The various holiday packages on offer make sure that all the various customer tastes and offerings are captured to a great extent. 4. It offers reservation services, on-flight services, baggage information and many others. 5. It also offers airport guides, transport services, travel services, baggage on arrival services and many more. 6. The services are for a large array of customers for dealing with every kind of currency and goodwill. Impact of the homepage and objectives: Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways homepage (see appendix 4,5,6) provides the user with an overview of their whole site, which is vitally important as (Nielsen, 2008) explains "The homepage is your companys face to the world." As recommended by Nielsen (2008) Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways have used a tagline to capture and communicate the essence of the company; making the sites purpose immediately clear. Their logo is also apparent, boosting brand awareness, differentiating identity from competitors and providing familiarity to users. It can be found in the top left hand corner of the homepage, showing standard HTML conventions have been adopted. Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways use standard hyperlinks, tab navigation, browse box, graphics and a search input box to help users interactively navigate the site, in a simple, easy to use fashion. Key worded category hyperlinks, emphasize product variety and the sites most important sections. Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways is a path-based homepage to split the audience immediately into interest groups and to offer them specific, more relevant information in menu pages deeper within the site. (Lynch and Horton, 2002.) Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways reveals real site content (Nielsen, 2008) offering easy access to recent homepage features. Homepages are updated regularly; visual graphics are kept meaningful and often represent new releases and recommendations, adding to the informal site personality. Text and graphic design is simple, increasing loading time. Color is basic, mainly white. We recommend the use of a white background; it makes the content easier to read “White in its nothingness acts as a wonderful balance between colors.” (Singh, 2001.) Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways homepages are space efficient and avoids over advertising which slows loading time. The homepage is sufficient to make a serious impact on the sales of tickets and drive customers. The sites Easy Jet, British Airways and Malaysia Airways are quite successful in catering the objectives of the customers and their selling tickets online. Task 2: E-Commerce Strategy: Business models: Kohinoor Ltd desires to make an impact with their online presence and continue the brand making in Asian fashion and jewellery stores to spread its essence globally. Kohinoor Ltd is already a brand retailer and would change the way business is conducted with its online presence with their business to consumer model (B2C.). They are presently brick and mortars and would convert into click and mortars and would enhance business and customer relationship management (CRM) which would be conducted via their website; a virtual marketplace with no direct contact between buyers and sellers. Kohinoor Ltd desires to create a virtualized value system through their accelerated ordering, delivery and payment of goods and services, while reducing operating and inventory costs associated with traditional bricks and mortar stores. They have access to global markets, economies of scale and the ability to personalize. As a prospective virtual merchant, their products are suited to the Internet, their business models remain a source of differentiation. Kohinoor Ltd would be a seller-controlled site whose commercial mechanism is fixed price sales. Kohinoor Ltds E-business model would be a click and mortars model with B2C primarily, which "helps build customer loyalty and trust through an interplay of virtual and physical realities." (Hagel and Armstrong, 2007) Kohinoor Ltd would strengthen their association as a virtual store with "shopping trolley technology" (Cooke, 1997.) Shopping carts and checkouts would act as reminders of physical environments. (Weick, 1995.) Kohinoor Ltds effectiveness as a physical community is evident with their customer co-presence. "Kohinoor Ltd has made customer relations the centerpiece of its strategy." (Hagel and Armstrong, 2007) Collaborative filtering helps them achieve personalization and mass customization. Customer extension would be offered via their site and e-mails. This would enable mutual close relationships significantly increasing customer loyalty, a major source of competitive advantage. Kohinoor Ltds e-business model is now considerably more flexible as it has diversified from fashion and jewellery to a range of products more typical of a retail store. (Chaffey, 2004.) Kohinoor Ltd has warehouses to support their technical innovations. Their distribution centers would play an active role to allow quick turn around on deliveries. Kohinoor Ltds brand has an excellent reputation due to their efficient purchasing system, prompt after-sales service and tight security measures. Kohinoor Ltd would be using innovative business models such as e-mail alerts, which would deliver value in ways that have not been economically viable in “traditional” physical settings. Their distinctiveness in their online value proposition "Earths biggest selection." Their brand, accompanied by reputation and trust is difficult for competitors to imitate, making it a source of sustained competitive advantage. Crucial to Kohinoor Ltds competitive advantage has been their ability to build affiliate/associate networks. "Kohinoor Ltd presently occupies 1000 affiliates’ networks to generate and move sales. They would strategize to enter exclusive fashion and jewellery relationships with five of the top six sites on the web: AOL, Yahoo, Netscape, GeoCities and Excite. (Rindova and Kotha, 1999.) Kohinoor Ltd pays commission on sales referred from these sites. In return brand awareness, traffic and sales for Kohinoor Ltd increase enormously. Due to the complexity and diversity of large scale web development it is vital to adhere to web engineering principles when re-developing their site. These principles offer a disciplined approach to achieving the most competitive website. Engineering principles will ultimately affect profit; costs of bad design are high. The Quality Requirements addressed by (Pressman, 2000) and aim to maximize performance in usability, functionality, reliability, efficiency and maintainability. Engineering principles will prevent problems with outdated or irrelevant information, slow response, crashes or security breaches to which web applications are sensitive. Web applications constantly evolve in terms of requirements and functionality and so our clients design must demonstrably fit context analysis. Engineering principles will minimize risk; improve quality, maintainability and scalability. Software Configuration Management and Quality Control should be addressed to maintain standards. Testing will help our client plan, monitor, control and cope with the challenge of their web application. Legal and ethical issues are vital to online success. Building trust and user confidence is essential to our client, respecting consumer privacy and adhering to data protection legislation. Consumers are extremely concerned about security and privacy on the Internet. Kohinoor Ltds Safe Shopping Guarantee means customers pay nothing if unauthorized charges are made to their credit cards as a result of shopping at Kohinoor Ltd. They would use secure sockets layer (SSL) technology encrypting all personal information. "Kohinoor Ltd takes customer fears about security seriously" (Chaffey, 2004). Kohinoor Ltd must make clear terms of trade and offer warranties/returns policy. They address copyright, patents and trademark protection. Short term objectives of Kohinoor Ltd: To build up a good website with greater usability features To develop a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan for wide marketing of the website so that customers get to know the website and its services E-marketing plans for wide publicity and know-how transition to the web world. Medium term objectives of Kohinoor Ltd: To offer various other business models catering to large base of customers like Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Enterprise (B2E) To develop and strengthen affiliate networks for better bringing of the customers to their websites through other websites. To arrange for “Hackers Free”, “VeriSign” logos on website for letting the customer know the various security measures taken up by the website to safeguard customers. To make sure that after sales service is done well The quality of services must be helpful to the customers and enough work must be done to capitalize on the customer feedback and satisfaction Long term objectives of Kohinoor Ltd: To expand its customer base to international countries To come up with various other products for better catering To generate safer mechanisms for better sale and winning customer trust To arrange better ways of handling financial and personal information of customers and align itself to various other mechanisms for safety Advantage of Google-Analytics: It is a web based tool which determines how people find websites, navigates websites and use them for their purpose. It helps at large the websites owners, marketing sites, affiliates, publishers and users to determine the variety of data usage and pattern recognition among the various products available. The following are the various functionalities it offers: It analyzes the various user patterns and their usage for developing the site statistics and trends Analyzes the conversion rate of the content and the very idea towards the generation of customers for serving the exact goal of the company. It also performs regional performance of the website for handling various customers The export of data can be done for a variety of data formats and tools for further development of the job It also combines internet marketing strategies like Google AD Words to analyze the specified usage of keywords, their net usage in bringing customer to the website and denoting further changes with the data. The analysis of revenue models that are specified through the website and the percentage of their work nature and ROI factors are also analyzed with the data. For example, Amazon.com may introduce Business to Supplier (B2S) and Consumer to Consumer (C2C) model for enhancing their sales up to 35%. The tracking of number of users who use your website is also done well; it helps you to analyze the better techniques for identifying the best customer usage pattern and their conversion rate in accordance to region, countries and continents. It helps you to detect the landing pages to determine what exactly the customer desires so that the conversion ratio is high. The change requirements of the website make sure that all the various parts of the website are usable and make sure to change the certain regions. Measuring deviations that result in great deal changes in the way customer behaves towards the brand making of the site. One problematic notion is that constant maintenance plans for a website must be devised to meet up with the recommendations. This would require consistent expenditure in the form of development cost, effort and time. Recommendations The website must be tested thoroughly for all benefits and advantages that require to be provided. The complexity of the various indulgencies makes sure that the very difference of thoughts are captured to its right extent and secured to make the user feel safe for their content. The security concerns and their various implications make sure that all the security concerns are addressed; however enough development and testing ethics must be devised for applications to be secured from all malpractices and various threats are addressed and taken care to their greatest extent to make the proactive and communication factor of global users quite secured and appealing. The use of Web 2.0 is recommended for providing a custom-based design for jewellery and other ornamental products and customer must be allowed to personalize their pages according to their requirements. Sound engineering principles is a necessity in the complexity /diversity surrounding online activity. Legal and ethical issues are vital to security conscious users. References/Bibliography Armstrong, A. & Hagel, J. (2007) The Real Value of On-line Communities, Harvard Business Review, pp.134-141. Bayers, C. (1999) The Inner Bezos. Retrieved 6 April 2008 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/bezos.html Cooke, M. (1997) Java e-commerce: technologies for distributed enterprise computing. Retrieved 6 April 2008 fromhttp://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martin/teaching/ecommerce/intro_1.ppt. Lynch, P. & Horton, S. (2002) Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition. Retrieved 6 April 2008 from http://www.webstyleguide.com/ Pressman. R. (2000) Software Engineering: A Practitioners Approach, McGrawHill, Maidenhead. Nielsen, J. (2008) When Bad Design Elements Become the Standard. Retrieved 6 April 2008 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991114.html. Rindova, V. & Kotha, S. (1999) Building Reputation on the Internet: Lessons from Amazon.com and its competitors. Retrieved 6 April 2008 from http://us.badm.washington.edu/kotha/personal/pdf%20files/amr_final.PDF, Singh, Vaishali. (2001) Colour Design for the Web. Retrieved 6 April 2008 from http://coolhomepages.com/cda/color/. Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. Websites: www.easyjet.com/ www.britishairways.com/ www.malaysiaairlines.com/ http://www.google.com/analytics/ Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Appendix 5 Appendix 6 Read More