Business Studies unit 15 ICT in Business
E-commerce
Britain is turning into a dot.com nation. By 2001 over 10 million homes had access to the Internet compared with 6 million the year before. Also, many people access the Internet through cyber cafés and schools, colleges and universities. In recent years, more and more people (specifically the young) have turned to e commerce.
Retailers simply cannot afford to ignore these developments. However, not all retailers are equally well placed to take advantage of this changing environment for trade.
Recent events have demonstrated that selling via the Internet is not a guaranteed success for all companies. Some Internet ventures have collapsed even though billions of pounds were spent on trying to build the brands. These examples include:
* Boo.com, an on-line fashion and sports clothes retailer, which failed despite having £12million ploughed into creating awareness of it.
* Webvan, which soaked up £700 million in an attempt to create a
large-scale retailing chain in the USA. Webvan had to file for bankruptcy.
Other companies are 'hanging in there', but have yet to make a profit. They struggle largely because they required an existing brand presence and needed to create one. Doing so is a long and expensive drag.
The potential of e commerce
E-commerce is seen as a major area of development over the next few years and virtually every well-known retailer is producing some form of web existence.
The major potential benefit through e Commerce for providers involves reducing work and manual processes. The benefit for suppliers involves freeing sales representatives from spending their time on administrative tasks, enabling them more time to sell, providing access to real-time sales information allowing for better management of fill-rates and operational processes, and reducing the level of effort for labour intensive administrative processes.
E-commerce
Britain is turning into a dot.com nation. By 2001 over 10 million homes had access to the Internet compared with 6 million the year before. Also, many people access the Internet through cyber cafés and schools, colleges and universities. In recent years, more and more people (specifically the young) have turned to e commerce.
Retailers simply cannot afford to ignore these developments. However, not all retailers are equally well placed to take advantage of this changing environment for trade.
Recent events have demonstrated that selling via the Internet is not a guaranteed success for all companies. Some Internet ventures have collapsed even though billions of pounds were spent on trying to build the brands. These examples include:
* Boo.com, an on-line fashion and sports clothes retailer, which failed despite having £12million ploughed into creating awareness of it.
* Webvan, which soaked up £700 million in an attempt to create a
large-scale retailing chain in the USA. Webvan had to file for bankruptcy.
Other companies are 'hanging in there', but have yet to make a profit. They struggle largely because they required an existing brand presence and needed to create one. Doing so is a long and expensive drag.
The potential of e commerce
E-commerce is seen as a major area of development over the next few years and virtually every well-known retailer is producing some form of web existence.
The major potential benefit through e Commerce for providers involves reducing work and manual processes. The benefit for suppliers involves freeing sales representatives from spending their time on administrative tasks, enabling them more time to sell, providing access to real-time sales information allowing for better management of fill-rates and operational processes, and reducing the level of effort for labour intensive administrative processes.
