Evaluation of Website - Case Study Example

Evaluation of Website Number of words 2897 Number of words (Incl References) : 3180 Introduction The website www.argos.co.uk is owned by a company Argos which is a part of retail giant Home Retail Group. Argos group was founded in 1973. It is a retailer chain devoted to satisfy the requirements of the consumers living in UK. It sells general merchandise and products from over 650 stores throughout UK. Apart from this online and telephone transactions of the selling of products is also done. Its online operations is bolstered by the fact that the website is the second most visited website in whole of UK and its popularity all over the country is well known as it became the Retail Week's Online Retailer of the year 2006. So this leads to question of analysis of this website. Since the whole website package is popular, we also need to understand the way the website was designed keeping the quality measures in mind. Before checking the quality measures and its related value creation model with regard to the website, we will first understand the structure and related outline of the whole website so that we can get fair overview while dealing with quality assessment of the website. Outline of the website The following website relates to the retailing merchandise and products selling over the electronic medium. The website sells all sorts of items available at a retail store of Argos, but in an online form. We can almost say that online retail trading has become the norm in this 21st century with practically technology sweeping across all forms of fields and areas. Now let's take a look at the website of the Argos. The website of Argos spellbinds any consumer because of the sheer range of services given to the retail consumers of the company. Even the range of items sold in one department or one section is large. Argos typically helps its online customers by dividing all items as per their section or department. For example a Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming sets would be found in Video Games Section. Argos Cleverly designed its main sections as Office, Personal, Video Games, Jewellery and Watches, Furniture, Kitchen and cooking items, photography and many other items. Now these are being portrayed as the head section or the main sub department of the retail goods and in turn each of these sections consists of sub sections like for example a furniture item section will consists of subsections as beds, sofas, office furniture, dining furniture etc. So if a customer is interested in buying office furniture he first needs to go to main section of furniture and furnishing and from where he will be navigated to the desired section of office furniture. Now the first step of any customer who wishes to buy retail goods from the online shop center of Argos is to get registered to the website. The website provides a login form wherein the customer will be asked to create a login id which enables him to access the online store. Once the customer is registered he will have all the amenities available to a person who goes for a local shopping store. So if a customer wants to buy a specific item he will go to that particular web page which sells this item and if he wants to buy it, he adds it to his virtual shopping trolley. Argos website also has promoted the goods by offering special discounts on the eve of Christmas and New Year. Also the online store has reduced the prices of all the goods it is selling on the internet workspace to attract more online customers to the website. Apart from this the website also has a feature which allows customers who logs on to the website, to receive some special offer announcements to their emails. The website also has facility which helps the customers who reside in UK to locate their nearest Argos store. The website also has provision of Customer services which help customers to understand the service, range of items, doubts regarding the shipping of items, payment details and terms and conditions regarding the whole process of online shopping and it also provides customers to ask queries regarding the whole procedure of online retail shopping. It also helps customers by providing instructions of using the website. Apart from the usual retail goods services, the customer services division also sheds light about the other Argos services like its Affiliate programs, its business solutions, job opportunities at Argos and contact information. Another important facet of website is the delivery mechanisms of the products which are being sold to the customers. Argos divides its delivery goods in two divisions. One is for the larger items and other for the smaller items. Smaller items delivery is done within a short span of time while the larger items delivery takes bit longer time. Delivery mechanisms, details about time and payment of the delivery and other special instructions have all been explained in a neat and lucid manner so that customers get the complete benefit of using the online store of Argos. The general customer's mindset in some parts of nation still is not sure of the concept of Internet shopping and to allay such fears Argos in their website has given complete information regarding the safety and security of online transactions. They have convinced the consumers that shopping through their online store is absolutely safe and secure. The website also provided information about the returns and refunds of the payment incase of damage of the goods ordered during the process of shipment. The best part of the website that Argos offers is the search feature of the goods items. Say for example the customer is not in the position to recollect the exact details of the goods he wants to purchase , he can always use this search mechanism wherein he can find the goods he was looking for, just by typing any keyword of the item or by typing the catalog number of the item. Thus in this way we have explained the basic outline and the whole layout of the website of the retail company. Analysis of the website using qualitative measures Whenever we talk about websites, one of the things which come to our mind is the quality of the website. The term quality assurance when applied in the context of websites describes the process of enforcing quality control standards, which in process improve the whole system present in the website. Whenever a quality standards are implemented in a proper fashion in a website, we see a steady improvement in the functioning of the website both performance wise and usability wise. The best part of quality assurance is that it reminds the designers of a website that the website is designed for the users who are not working on it nor are present in that office. Website is for the customers around the world. If we look at the websites present in the present day web space we can see that most of them are not valid. If we look at the mindset of the people the technology domain most of them are skeptical of using standards which improve the capability of the website. Also people think that maintaining quality standards to a website might hurt the finances of the company but we can say that these all are myths people have. Maintaining a quality standard always improves the quality of a website and in turn it can bring accolades for the owners and designers. So a website which is readily absorbing for the customer always follows the qualitative treatment. So a website like Argos if needed to maintain consistency in its web popularity must also show considerable amount of quality standards. In order to understand the qualitative analysis of the website, we use some of the best services available in the web domain. One of the most famous services used in determining the quality of a website is WebQual. WebQual uses a statistically validated and reliable measure for determining Website Quality. WebQual is founded on the perception that web sites are perceived as form of Information systems since the usage of a website requires hardware and software which focuses on information storage and display thus making it an information system. It uses a method of instrument development which serves as guiding process of development. Apart from this new techniques are used to confirm the reliability and validity of the measure. In the initial stage of the whole process three steps of qualitative data collection will be used. First step is to consider the consumer perception of the website, which is handled by asking or giving them question form which talks about the website in general and website quality in particular. Consumer perception gives us the idea about the quality of website in one format. Now the second step is the get the idea of the website and its quality from the designer's point of view. We bring out a discussion forum wherein the designers of the website discuss about the possible methods to improve the quality of the website. Now the whole idea of website quality is understood from the designer's side too. Finally the last step is to take an outsiders view, in this case a Fortune 500 company whose criteria of the determining the website quality is matched with the customer's and designer's view. After this process is completed two more rounds of data collection is performed in order to test the validity and reliability. Performing such a research analysis reveals different components of website quality like design, intuitiveness, visual appearance, innovativeness, flow, integrated communications, business process relationship etc. So let's apply these tests on our Argos website. Firstly Lets apply the first step of taking a customer point of view. As we know that Argos was rated as the second most viewed Internet site in the whole of UK, so getting a customer response is not a difficult process for the retail company. One of the better ways to get the customer viewpoint about the quality of website is to create a question form in a web page and attest the webpage before the customer finalizes his goods payment. So every time a customer buys some product from the online store he will be asked to fill a question form about the website quality and the customer comments about the whole website and quality of website. So in this way we receive a whole bunch of comments given by different customers and based on such an analysis we can bring the overall viewpoint of an average general customer who has visited the site. In this manner the first step of WebQual assessment is being done. Now to perform the second step of getting a designer's assessment, the company officials can bring out a discussion forum which includes all the designers who have developed this website of the retail goods and products. They are also given a question form which talks about the website quality from designer point of view. Such a question form will enable the officials dealing with marketing and other company people to realize the value of quality of website from the designers themselves. Now the third step is to take a fortune 500 company like IBM or Accenture which can do research analysis of the whole website and its quality. In this way performing two rounds will ensure validity and reliability of the whole website. Thus WebQual methodology has been of immense help in determining the quality of website of the retail company. Another important aspect related to the website quality is the concept of accessibility. Accessibility is one of the important concepts when we consider the quality of website. Many a time customer wants to move form one item to another if we consider an online retail shop, so in such a scenario, the website must provide a clear cut process of moving from one section to another section. Improper access locations can frustrate the customer leading to a loss of a customer which can have detrimental effect on organization. So in order to remove the accessibility problems in site like Argos which deals with products and services, we can implement some accessibility review tools. Firstly we select a page sample and then we examine the page using both graphical and specialized browsers. Then we use automated web accessibility evaluation tools. Some of tools used are HTML Validation service, HTML tidy and CSS Validation Service. Performing these on regular basis will ensure that accessibility problems won't arise in this website. Thus in this way we have discussed about the quality measures taken up in order to improve the whole site of Argos. Value Creation Model E-commerce today has changed the way the society lives. The advent of Internet has led to online transactions spawning many E-commerce firms. This also led to the concept of Business model. With the growing internet space, management executives have realized the importance of business model in E-commerce activities. A business model can be defined as the architectural configuration of the components of the transactions which are designed to exploit business opportunities in a market segment. Another important model which is spoken along with business model is revenue model. A revenue model refers to the ways in which a business model enables revenue generation. Now let's talk about eValue model. This model refers to the total value created for all the participants involved in a transaction which are enabled by the business model. eValue facilitates a comparison among the value creating potential of different e-commerce business models. The major driving forces are efficiency, novelty, complementarities and lock-in. we can say that the value creating potential of any model is propelled with the presence of these driving forces. Efficiency If the transaction efficiency gains which are enabled by a business model are increased then value of the business model also increases. We can realize the efficiency enhancements in many ways. Firstly we can reduce the information asymmetries between buyer and seller through the constant supply of latest information. if we have latest up to date information we can reduce the bargaining costs which enables us to make a quick well informed decisions about the process. It also simplifies transactions and thus can reduce mistakes in whole process of activity of trade. It also allows individual customer to reap benefits from the scale economies through demand aggregation. It streamlines the supply chain and in process speeds up the transaction processing thus benefiting both the customers and suppliers. Novelty Novelty defines new ideas being brought out into the market segment. These ideas which have never been part of any company's implementation plan constitute it to be novel idea. For example Argos can bring out new marketing scheme wherein it can bring more than 70% discount of every Video Game purchased on every 10th day of the month. This whole idea is unique as it attracts the customers to buy the goods thus improving the productivity of the company. Unearthing hidden sources of value by identifying new products and services in a business model can be considered to be a novel idea which adds the value to the whole system. Novelty can be enhanced by the gain of knowledge of the latest and private information which has not been accessed by the others in the market segment so that applying it in a business model can enhance the value of the model. Complementarities We can say that a particular player is our complementor if the customer values our product more when he has the other player's product than when he has our product alone. More generally , just by denoting a customer's willingness-to-pay by WtP, two products or services A and B are complementary if WtP (A+B) > WtP (A) + WtP (B). All the E-commerce firms can increase their potential for the value creation by offering bundles of complementary products and services to their customers Lock-in The value of a business model also depends to the extent it is able to motivate customers to engage in continuous loop transactions. This characteristic can be termed as Lock-in property of a business model. It refers to the switching costs faced by customers who consider using alternative businesses. There are several ways in which customer retention can be enabled by a business model. One method is to reward the customers with bonuses and special offers and discounts on the goods they buy. Another method is to develop a warm relationship with the customer by offering reliability and consistency to the services which are being provided to him. This way we can bring back lot of customers who have left before and thus can help our company grow in a positive manner. Conclusion After having understood the outline and basic structure of the Argos website we can say that Argos website has been one of those websites which have clear demarcations of the various roles and tasks it performs in the retail sales. All the items have clearly been shown in different WebPages. Also the accessibility problems are not being faced by any customer due the accessibility evaluation techniques which are being used. We can say that the website and quality of website have been on upward trend thus making it very efficient and effective in both display and performance. Finally we can say that the usage of the driving forces can only make the website a powerful website and also implementation of it can make the website as the most viewed website in the future. References: 1. Janice Reynolds (2003) The E-commerce Books. Irvine: Wiley & sons 2. Al Kernek (2004) Putting Business Online. New York: Pacifica Endeavors 3. Robin Nobles (2001) Website Analysis & Reporting .Roseville: PrimaPub 4. Paola Tonella (2000) Website Analysis: Structure & Evolution icsm, p. 76,16th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'00). 5. Leigh Sparks (2003) catalog of success. Services Industries Journal Vol 23 pg 79 6. 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