Internet Business and E-Commerce - Essay Example

E-commerce can be between business to business (B2B) or even business to consumers (B2C). Therefore, e-commerce is actually conducting the whole of business online or if there still exists an operational offline real world shop of the business, then e-commerce can be used just for expansion purposes. 1 In this text, it is being assumed that a seller of leather goods is planning to go online through e-commerce. This seller has a very good repute in the market for selling the most premium leather goods.

The company, Exquisite Leathers, has 5 branches all over the city and caters to the elite class. For now, it plans to open an online section so that it can expand its business even better. There can be a number of reasons for which a company can go online. The first and foremost reason, which has been mentioned earlier as well, is that the company might want to expand. Expansion can be in terms of serving new customers. When a company goes online, they are now virtually accessible to anyone all over the world.

Therefore, if Exquisite Leathers plans to make international customers, this is the best way to do it. When the company will be placed online, it will be accessible to leather good buyers globally. The company will definitely have to use various strategies to make sure that they come to be noticed by all the customers. But e-commerce is the best starting point for expanding any given company's customer base. For that the company will first have to do the demand analysis of leather goods all over the world.

This will tell them of their potential market. After this, the company will have to analyse that whether it can even cater to the whole target market that the demand analysis is giving. Therefore, the company will now have to decide on a target market, the market that the company wishes to serve. The target market will depend on the resources of the company to fulfill the needs of a given market. 2 The second reason for going online would be to increase sales. This is a requisite of increasing the customer base, but if we keep the customer base variable constant and just serve the same city that the company already has branches in, and then this reason will be even more valid.

For example, if the company does not want to cater to international customers and just wants to make sure that it is fully available to all the customers within the same city, then e-commerce would be a great idea too. This is because there are many customers who are very busy and they do not get the time to go to physical shops and buy leather goods. Providing them with an online store of the shop will make the store easily accessible and available only on a click. This will ensure that the target market that the company wished to serve in the city, that is the elite market, is fully reaching them.

Methods Adopted to go Online: A company can use two methods to go online. The first one is that of designing and launching the website themselves. As far as the second method is concerned, it is to go online by outsource the making of the website. The first method includes designing and launching the website themselves. This can be done by assigning the Information Technology department of the company to take care of all the details related to the website. But this does not mean that the Information T