EnVisage.Com - case study.

• CUSTOMER SERVICE: This is where phone operators will no longer be needed as all information will be available online.

• PUBLIC RELATIONS: The Internet can be used as a new channel for public relations (PR) and provides the opportunity to publish the latest news on products, markets and people.

Understanding the users of the Internet:

Bikerton identifies the following types of Internet users:

1. Techno-Lusters: They focus upon culture & technology.

2. Academic Buffs: Originally one of the main users, now less significant.

3. Techno Boffins: Similar to the techno-lusters, but make more directed use of the technology for business purposes.

4. Get Aheads: They use the Internet as a life style accessory, the use the e-mail service and use the Internet for product selection.

5. Hobbyists: People with specialist interests who use the Internet for purchase selection, such as golfers, fisher men or car enthusiasts.

6. Knowledge Traders: Business-orientated users who turn to the Internet for news services and information on best  practices.

7. Business Bods: General business users in management or procurement roles.

8. Home Users: Members of families looking for education, entertainment or purchases.

From the types of users listed above, the most likely users of the web site for EnVisage.Com would be the Get Aheads and the Home Users. This is because these users are more likely to come across the web site from general browsing especially when online shopping, they may come across it when looking for a specific product, this product being women’s clothing, they may just even come across it, if advertising and promotion proves successful.

Potential business benefits from having an online business:

• Lower communication costs
• Online transactions
• Market expansion
• Brand awareness

From a report conducted from Anderson Consulting in 1999, further benefits were identified, this was 300 executives from European companies were interviewed and had identified the following benefits as important:

From this it has been identified that doing business online will be of a beneficial business venture for the several reasons mentioned above.

Using McDonald’s  framework for Internet Marketing Strategy development the following flow chart will be used and implemented within EnVisage’s strategy for marketing:

 

Internet Marketing Strategy

Objectives

1. To break-even within the first six months of being in business online.

2. To create brand and customer awareness via the Internet.

3. To build on customer trust and product quality.

4. To Reduce transaction costs from online retailing.

Internet marketing value proposition

• All garments are tailor-made: no matter how small or large the customer we can get the perfect fit in all designs.

• All garments are of high quality, at accessible prices.

The above propositions will be clearly evident and displayed on the web site to indicate to customers the reasons as to why they should purchase goods from EnVisage.Com and why they should visit the site in the future. Having a clearly evident marketing value proposition on the web site will give the following benefits:

• It will help to distinguish the site from our competitors

• If the proposition is clear it can be used for public relations, and word of mouth recommendations may be made about the company.

Consumer distribution channel

The type of channel that EnVisage.Com will be using is as follows:

This type of distribution channel is referred to as disintermediation omitting the wholesaler. Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries such as distributors or brokers that formerly linked a company to its customers. The producer refers to our sub contractors abroad who will be making the garments to our size and design specifications. These garments are then sold to our customers where we are retailing online.

Planning web site development:

The following process will be used for the web site’s development:

Domain name registration

www. EnVisage..com has been registered with huihuihuihuih . The first step was to register the domain name, this was because, legally the first company to register the name is the one that takes ownership. The cost of this was £huihuih, and it lasts for two years, every two years registration will have to be renewed. The ISP (Internet Service Provider) will be the same organization that we have registered our domain name with.

Designing web site content

This will be done by a web development company, “ughuihuo”. They will fulfill our needs by making sure the following is implemented in to the web site:

• Company logo on every page
• Internet marketing value proposition on every page
• Description of security for online transactions ensuring the customers that their card details are safe
• Consistency in design
• Easy navigation
• Designed for the novice user
• Quick downloadable images
• Able to view images of garments with a zoom-in function
• A site map should be included
• A search function should be included
• The site should be accessed by Microsoft Explorer as the main web browser
• Confirmation (online) for online purchases as soon as transaction has been completed
• Changes should be made through Microsoft FrontPage

The remainder elements and design decisions will be left to the employed sub-contractors. The sales & marketing director is an expert user of Microsoft FrontPage and will monitor, change and maintain the web site using ‘FrontPage’ once the web site has been published.

Test, revise & review content

Using Jakob Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation the web site will be tested against the following criteria:

1. Visibility of system status: This is where the system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

2. Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-orientated terms. Follow real world conventions, making information appear in natural and a logical order.

3. User control and freedom: Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked ‘emergency exit’ to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue, support undo and redo.

4. Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing, they should follow platform conventions.

5. Error prevention: Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.

6. Recognition rather than recall: Make objects, actions and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators – unseen by the novice user-may often speed up the interaction for the expert user to such an extent that the system can cater to both inexperience’s and experienced users, it should allow users to tailor frequent actions.

8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.

9. Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

10. Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

The main essence of the evaluation is to identify any problems with the system and make any necessary changes and then the design phase is complete until the products need changing on the web site.

Promoting the web site

Banner Advertisement – a rectangular graphic displayed on a web page for the purposes of advertising. It is normally possible to perform a click-through to access further information; banners may be static or animated.

The two main reasons for banner advertising are:

• In the hope that the customer will click on the advertisement and then will be exposed to more detailed brand information on the company’s web site.

• All visitors to page will see an advertisement, either noting it consciously or viewing it subconsciously. This can help to establish or reinforce a brand image.

Banner advertisement will be placed on the following web sites:

•  - This is where a banner will be placed at the header of the page every day of the week for one hour (randomly selected hour of the day). The cost of this will be £289 for two weeks, this will be done once very two months for our web site.
•  - This web site is an Asian information fashion web site, to date hits have been made at least 64,000 times a week. They will put our banner on their fashion pages. Their charges include £40 for registration of our company name and £149 for the banner advertisement. The proposed banner will be placed there all year around.
•  - This web site hosts links to all major Pakistani business in the UK. Companies range from taxi firms to restaurants and builders. They charge £80 a year for a full web page about our company and will offer a link to our main web site. This will also be an ongoing process for EnVisage.Com, subscription will be renewed every year.

Registering the site with search engines

The graph below displays the number of visitors to a web site

From the graph above it can be identified that the most popular search engines are:

1. Yahoo
2. Netscape
3. Google
4. Excite
5. Microsoft

To register with every single one is a complicated and expensive process. Therefore we will register with Yahoo & Google which will cost £259 each year. For the rest we will outsource the promotion of the site through search engines to another company. The company we will use is Site Lynx (), the charges for this are £119.99 for two years. This includes registering our site with several search engines for two years but each month, the search engines will change, this will enable us to cover a wide range of search engines.

The reason as to why it is so cheap is that we do not have a say in which search engines EnVisage.Com will be registered with. We are allowed twenty keywords for Yahoo & Google, these will be:

1. EnVisage
2. Eastern Fashions
3. East & West fashions
4. Asian fashions
5. Youth fashions
6. Trendy fashions
7. Women’s fashions
8. Ladies fashions
9. Asian Wear
10. Pakistani fashions
11. Indian fashions
12. Eastern & Western fashions
13. Online Asian store
14. Online Boutique

N.B. Key words can have up to five words for each set.

Registration of a site with a range of search engines is essential; otherwise the site will not be listed. If this was the case our web site would appear to be non-existent, therefore no business. It is therefore very important to register with search engines.

Reciprocal Promotion

To help save money but still enhance our promotion prospects we will be using reciprocal promotion. This is where EnVisage.Com will advertise another company’s URL address and services using a banner on their web site, in return for EnVisage.Com banner being put on the other web site. The aim is to have at least five types of these deals with other companies and in time many more, these companies include:

•  - has been mentioned before
•  - this is a web site that advertises mehndi artists
•  - this is an Asian online magazine
•  - this is an Asian online bridal magazine
•  - this is a Western Asian magazine online

E-mail Surge

This is where the use of , EnVisage.Com will get a mailing list for their target audience and will e-mail these customers to inform them of new products and heavily promote the brand and web site. The e-mail will look something like this:

Online Transactions

The payments system online will have the following features:

• Security (achieving privacy, authentications, integrity and no-repudiability)
• Be straight forward for banks to administer
• Be scalable across different currencies and to different denominations
• Have low costs for implementing transactions

The payment system will be designed and implemented with the above by our external web developers. All credit and debit cards will be accepted for online transactions.

Security for Online Transactions

This is where SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) system will be used for all online transactions. This is where the payment mechanism is via an intermediary between a bank and the merchant. SET is a standard for public key encryption intended to enable e-commerce transactions that are more secure than those based on SSL (Secure Socket Layer). It was lead-developed by Mastercard and Visa, and has numerous other backers such as Microsoft.

SET is important because it offers protection from repudiation and unauthorized payments. The mechanism for SET is shown below:

SET works as follows for a transaction between a customer and a merchant:

1. The customer selects items at a merchant’s. Payment card details are entered to purchase items on an order form that is sent to the merchant.
2. Payment information is forwarded from the merchant to the acquirer
3. The acquirer decodes the customer’s payment information and asks the card issuer for authorization
4. When the card issuer accepts the request for authorization (this happens in real time in a process similar to that which occurs at a shop today), the acquirer sends the information back to the merchant, who then confirms the purchase to the customer
5. The purchase price is then deducted as normal from the customer’s account

Even though the transaction process is complex it remains invisible to both the cardholder and the shop, a shopping transaction via the Internet can be completed in less then a minute. Note that the acquirer is an intermediary who liaises between the bank and the merchant to remove the need for the merchant to have the infrastructure to link directly to the bank.

Maintaining the web site

Garments that are out of stock will be replaced with new garments every two weeks, as mentioned before this will be done by the sales & marketing director using Microsoft FrontPage. The public relations page will be updated every week, which will include What’s New?, press articles, interviews with fashion designers and discount vouchers.

Measuring site effectiveness

Business effectiveness measures:

Business effectiveness measures assess how the Internet is affecting the performance of the whole business. This will be done by:

• Identifying profitability of web site, if sales are low we will have to introduce a discount scheme and increase web site promotion

• Identifying ROI (Return On Investment) – This is a measurement over a longer period that calculates the return (amount of revenue) compared with initial investment and operational costs.

Marketing effectiveness measures:

Marketing effectiveness measures will reflect how well the web site is fulfilling the needs of the marketing manager. These will be more traditional marketing measures that describe a company’s success in acquiring and retaining customers and making sales such as:

• Customer acquisition or new leads generated by the web site
• Sales generates directly and indirectly by the web site
• Impact on market penetration and demand
• Customer satisfaction and retention rates of clients who use the Internet, compared with those who do not
• Incremental or cross-sales achieved through the Internet
• Impact of Internet on customer satisfaction, loyalty and brand

Internet sales will be expressed as:

• Internet sales as a proportion of all sales made by company compared with sales by all companies operating in market (the Internet contribution)
• Internet sales as a proportion of all Internet sales for company (the Internet market penetration)

Marketing effectiveness also includes less tangible benefits, beneficial elements, such as:

• Corporate image and brand enhancement through online public relations
• Building long-term client relationships and reducing ‘churn’ of customers

Internet marketing effectiveness:

Measures of Internet marketing effectiveness involve assessing how well the particular online techniques required for effective Internet marketing are working. In order to measure the sites effectiveness investments will be made in the following:

• Hit counter – This will measure how many visits have been made to the web site.

• Page Impressions – This will measure the same as above but is a more reliable measuring tool as it denotes one person viewing one page.

Measuring the popularity of the site will enable the company to identify whether there is potential for online sales.

Online measurement methods

This is where we will use web site auditors who will audit our site every six months. Registration fee is £125; this includes the purchase of specialist software that monitors the sites performance. The actual web site auditing will cost £240 each time. This includes a full report, which identifies the following:

1. Page impression for different parts of the site: The log file indicates which parts of the site are most popular and which are not successful. By carefully analyzing these figures the following may be apparent:

1. Web pages that are difficult to find using the site navigation facilities may not be popular: action – consider modifying navigation.
2. Unpopular pages may not have a suitable incentive or offer to encourage users to visit that part of the site.

2. Page impressions broken down by different time intervals: How page impressions vary through time can be shown using different time intervals such as hours during the day, days of the week or through a month or a year. Short-term trends may indicate something about the behaviour of the users that can be turned to advantage for promotion.

Such information enabled a company who offered life insurance found that the peak time in the week for visits was Monday lunchtime. This was thought to be because people at work were comparing offers after reviewing offers in Sunday’s newspapers. As a result it was decided to place advertisements on a search engine at this time on Monday lunchtime.

3. Page impressions by domain: The web analysis package may indicate a high level of interest in a company’s products from a particular country in which the company does not currently have any distributor arrangements.

4. Page impressions by browser type: This information is of less value, but if it is found that many of a company’s customers are still using older browsers, the designer’s of the company’s web site should test content on these browsers.

5. Referring sites. A knowledge of which sites are referring sites is useful when a company is considering a traffic-building campaign since it indicates how users are finding the company’s site.

APPENDIX 1

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE OF DIRECTORS

SHADA PARVEEN – Sales & Marketing Director

AGE: 26

QUALIFICATIONS: BA (Hons) Business Information Systems

RELEVENT EXPERIENCE:

Experience of management through:

1. TEAM MANAGER: For a call center at Telewest Communications – 1 YEAR
2. SUPERVISOR: For a web developing company: Pakistani Directory

– 2 YEARS

3. WEEKEND SALES MANAGER: For a retailing company, Taj Collections

– 4 YEARS

Fully competent user of all software packages that relate to web developing, marketing and general office software.

ASMAT RAZA – Financial Director

AGE: 27

QUALIFICATIONS: BA (Hons) Business Management & Accountancy

                        Fully ACCA qualified

EXPERIENCE: fully trained and experience in financial reporting. Also has experience of managing through a one year post graduate management training scheme with Marks & Spencers.

SAIMA QAYUM – Operations & Distributions Director

AGE: 26

QUALIFICATIONS: BA (Hons) Business Logistics & Management

EXPERIENCE: Manager of inbound and outbound logistics for Argos for 3 Years. Prior to this have worked in a factor as a assembly manager for 2 years with FLITZ, a clothing manufacture, where I was involved in designing women’s wear and in charge of quality of goods.

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