2 Situation Analysis
2.1 Present position analysis
2.1.1 SWOT Analysis
Every business organization has their own some amount of strength, weakness, opportunities and threats. In order to keep the organization run in a specific level, it is necessary to keep tracking their current organization situation (strength, weakness, opportunities and threats) which is provided by SWOT analysis.
In this section of report, a SWOT analysis has been carried out on the E-Business strategy of Tesco.
2.1.1.1 Strength of Tesco E-Business
- Tesco has globally maintained its strong image in the market of the business especially in UK as its strongest strength of Tesco’s e-business.
- Tesco.com offers highly diversified products to customers including various non-food products (Chaffey, 2008).
- Tesco.com has also provided the Clubcard vouchers services to the customers offering the customers as a gift from Tesco for buying the products from Tesco.com.
- Tesco.com has been fully aware of their supplier’s reliability and products availability for the customers (IVIS Group, 2005).
- Tesco.com IT infrastructure is based on advanced features allowing the centralized data store for efficient matching and controlling of product information (IVIS Group, 2005).
2.1.1.2 Weakness of Tesco E-Business
- Tesco online retail has been expensive retail comparing to other business retails.
- Many of the IT infrastructure facilities are not directly owned by Tesco.com
- Only clubcard holder are being facilitated with range of facilities by Tesco.com
- Tesco doesn’t operate its own warehouse providing the products from suppliers to customers (Lankenau et al., 2004).
2.1.1.3 Opportunities for Tesco
- Tesco e-business investment in ready meal can highly expand its business increase its market share and market creditability.
- Tesco can implement the multi-channel e-business strategy rather than focusing on online and offline dominated strategies. This would allow the customer to switch the Tesco’s channel.
- Appling the multi-channel e-business strategy can also provide the Tesco an opportunity to sell the products into new markets which can greatly improve the supply chain management of Tesco.com
2.1.1.4 Threats
- The changes in technologies as well as international regulations can highly affect the Tesco.com strategies and planning in a negative way.
- The increasing trend of lowering the price of products within other markets could reduces the sales of Tesco.com.
- Tesco’s international expansion of business can be heavily expensive causing to ignore the other more important operations.
2.1.2 PEST Analysis
In many cases, the change in environmental factors has been a great cause of degrading business or companies bankrupt. In order to reduce these threats, a strategic analysis has to be carried out which will be provided by PEST Analysis strategy and planning.
This section of report provides a PEST Analysis carried out on Tesco’s e-business based on the PEST strategy factors such as Political, Economic, Social and Technical.
2.1.2.1 Political Factors
As a globalized retailer, Tesco has been operating in different environment of countries where the political conditions and legislation highly varies. This condition has highly influenced the performance of Tesco e-business.
The government legislation encourages retailers to provide the job opportunities such as lower-paid, higher-paid, centrally-located jobs and locally-based jobs to highly skilled which also meet the demand of categories of population such as students, working parents, and senior citizens. Tesco understands that retailing has a great impact on job opportunities and has provided large number of jobs to students, disabled and elderly workers paying in lower rates.
2.1.2.2 Economical Factors
An economical factor has a great impact on Tesco’s e-business as they highly influence the demand, costs, price, and profits. One of the major economical factors that highly influence Tesco’s e-business is a level of unemployment’s which decrease the demand of goods and products. Although these economical factors are outside the control of the company, the effects on the performance of the company can be profound because of growing profits in international business.
2.1.2.3 Social Factors
Social changes have been a great influence in the performance of Tesco’s e-business. The population analysis of UK showed high level of retired people than of children representing the Baby Boom generation (Scotland, 2010). The elderly people are less likely to go around supermarkets comparing to younger generation which is discouraging the retailers. Although the literacy level rate is decreasing, it is found that the online shopping for elderly people have never been suitable (Turban et al., 2001).
People nowadays are more health conscious which is degrading the sales of the food products. The increment in demand of organic food by most of the people has been accepted by Tesco in order to reflect this change in demand.
2.1.2.4 Technological Factor
The supply chain, process and operations of Tesco’s e-business have great impact of technology. The use of internet service for retailing has been growing steadily affecting the operations of supermarkets as the use of internet have grown by over 50% and it is estimated that 70% population of UK uses internet services (Office for National Statistics, 2010). The online shopping service of Tesco has been very popular due to increased use of internet in UK.
The mobile technology has also been a platform for retailing the products. Since 2009, Tesco has been using the Wine Application enabling the customers to buy wines directly from their mobile phones (Tomlinson & Evans, 2010).
2.2 Industry Analysis
2.2.1 Porter’s five forces
As section 2.1 focuses on the analysis of internal factors of Tesco’s e-business, it is as important as internal factor analysis to carry out the analysis of external factors such as competition threats, substitute product and services threats, customer bargaining threats and supplier bargaining threats of Tesco’s e-business. Porter’s five forces provide a framework in order to analyze these kinds of external factors of Tesco’s e-business.
2.2.1.1 Threat of New Entrants
The UK’s online grocery market has been controlled by four major companies such as Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Safeway possessing a market share of 70%. The large chain companies have built up their own power due to operating efficiency such as ‘one-stop shopping’ and marketing expenditure of e-business. This has been affecting a great problem for small shops and new companies because of highly developed supply chain and investments. The investment made by large chain companies such as Tesco and Asda in advanced technologies like stock control systems; checkout systems are greatly affecting the new entrants (Ritz, 2005).
2.2.1.2 Threats of Substitute Products
The substitution of product can highly affect the Tesco’s sales performance as there are lots of alternatives for demanded products of customers (Porter, 1980). The substitution of products is weakened by the new trends as the small useful stores are emerging in the industry. In this case, Tesco, Ada and Sainsbury’s are trying to acquire existing small-scale operations and opening metro and express stores in local town and city centers (Ritz, 2005).
2.2.1.3 Bargaining Power of Customers
The famous Tesco’s Clubcard has been the most successful customer retention strategy that has been significantly maintaining the Tesco’s profits. The satisfying customer needs, low prices, services, better choices strategy of Tesco has been successfully able to control and retain the customers.
2.2.1.4 Bargaining Power of Suppliers
Suppliers often are greatly influenced by major grocery chains and often fears losing their business with large industries. Therefore, leading stores like Tesco and Asda often get the products in their negotiated prices from suppliers comparing to small stores (Ritz, 2005). The UK based suppliers are always threatened of the growing retailer providing the products in cheaper prices.
2.2.1.5 Competitive Rivalry within an Industry
The UK’s increase large retailers have been significantly growing their grocery market in size. Large chain stores as Tesco are acquiring large amounts of consumer information that can be used to communicate with the consumer (Ritz, 2005). This highly competitive market has further accelerated level of development, resulting in a situation in which UK grocery retailers have had to be innovative to maintain and build market share.
3 E-Marketing Strategy
3.1 E-Business Strategies
Since 1994, Tesco has been operating an internet market being a first and robust home shopping retailer in UK. Over past years, it has been providing the highly diversified range of products making the range of choices to the customers. With the sustained growth of Tesco’s e-business, Tesco is been operating through internet in 13 different countries including UK. In order to support the highly diversified business in these areas, Wade-Gery (CEO of Tesco.com) adopted the home delivering strategy prioritizing it as the DNA of Tesco.com (Howel, 2005). She also focused on improving the online customer experience decreasing the time of order completion up to 35 minutes in major sites (Chaffey, 2008).
In 2005, Tesco.com reached 30,000 signed up members for DVD rental, through Partner Video Island. Over the next year, Gery targeted the goal of trebling the online customers making use of home delivery service (Chaffey, 2008).
In 2003, Tesco.com paid 2 million in order to get license to eDiets.com in UK and Ireland under to URLs and promoting its partner eDiets through the Tesco Clubcard members mailing to 10 million members a year. Promoting these services Tesco.com achieved the expanded business of dieting business (Chaffey, 2008).
In order to keep the focus on home delivery services, Gery sold her own portal iVillage() back to its US owners in 2004 explaining to NMA about the differences between providing services and products to the customer and the world of providing information. She also explained about the insufficient revenues from ads on iVillage as well as limited opportunities promoting Tesco.com (Chaffey, 2008).
Tesco.com also provides the broadband and dial up mobile services as the service is named as Tesco Mobile. With the invention of new mobile technologies like Internet Telephony such as Skype and Vonage, Tesco.com focused on more traditional and popular mobile technologies such as fixed-line services and attracted over a million customers in its first year. In 2004, Tesco introduced the music download services with the estimation of around 10% market share within six months. Introducing this service also helped promoting the hardware sales like mp3 players (Chaffey, 2008).
In 2007, Tesco introduced an online price comparison site name as Tesco Compare. Wade-Gery, as the CEO of Tesco.com produced these strategies based on the analysis of customer demand. She believed and focused more on the customer needs as a result more popularity and enhancement of Tesoc.com.
According to the 2011 annual report of Tesco, Tesco has evolved new strategy and preparing for its implementation. The strategy named as ‘Seven Part Strategy’ applies to five business segments of Tesco – the UK, Asia, Europe, the United States and Tesco Bank and aims to broaden the scope of the business to enable it to deliver strong sustainable long term growth. The Seven Part Strategy includes strategies for seven segments of Tesco including Tesco’s e-business aiming the goal to be an outstanding international online retailer (Tesco, 2011).
3.2 Competitions
In the market of UK, Tesco e-business has been attracting attention for its ability to thwart Wal-Mart’s Asda division in UK and also looking for the strategies for competing with US Wal-Mart. Besides Wal-Mart, Sainburys is also considered as a strong competitor of Tesco. According to the Hitwise list of 2005, Tesco has been considered as the UK’s leading grocery retailing holding the market share of 27.28% as Asda and Sainsbury was listed in second and third position.
3.3 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Issues and Strategies
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of building and maintaining relationship with customers. In order to maintain a good relation with customers, organizations usually implement the model of it based on the company’s strategy. A normal CRM includes four core activities: customer selection, customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer extension. These four core activities are basically implemented in every organization CRMs. Tesco.com has also adapted these program considering these four main activities with the use of technology and has been successfully implemented these program over 14 years.
3.3.1 Customer Selection Strategy of Teso.com
According to Clive Humby (Chairman of DunnHumby), CRM program of Tesco has been greatly supportive introducing the Tesco Clubcard in 1995. Introducing the Tesco clubcard the customers were more encouraged to buy the products from Tesco.com as customer selection program of CRM was also been adapted with its uses. Tesco found that top 100 customers of Tesco.com was the worth same as bottom 4000 customers, as they realized about the importance of prioritizing the top customers. Tesco clubcard program adapted this customer selection program in such a way that in every swipe of the card, Tesco was getting valuable information of the customers including individual customer sales along with the product and customer information. This information gained with the use of Tesco clubcard greatly helped categorizing and refining the top customers of Tesco.com.
3.3.2 Customer Acquisition Strategy of Tesco.com
Tesco.com has been focusing lot in marketing strategies in order to acquire more and new customers. More importantly, Tesco.com is trying hard to obtain customer loyalty providing higher quality products in comparable prices and also providing excellent services to customers. Their aim of providing the best possible value for their customer’s money has been attracting the great attention towards new customers. As advertisement is the core strategy of every business in order to gain new customer focus, Tesco.com has also been in top social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
3.3.3 Customer Retention Strategy of Tesco.com
With the customer prioritization schema gained from the usage of Tesco clubcard, Tesco.com offers many facilities to their existing customers from time to time. Based on the analysis of customers needs, likes and age obtained from the Tesco clubcard, Tesco.com offers the top customers the products that the customer would like to have and need.
Tesco.com also provided the voucher of the items to their top customers according to their preferred product items and also offers to explore the other part of Tesco.com which the customer wouldn’t had explored. Based on the top customer list of Tesco.com, Tesco started mailing the customer offering different products as customer likes in a cheaper price as well as some extra privileges and services. With the customer need, Tesco.com also provides the home delivery services even with the refrigerated truck if necessary.
3.3.4 Customer Extension Strategy of Tesco.com
Tesco.com has always been focused on customer extension program. Through, the help of loyalty card program, Tesco always gets to know the customer needs individually. Based on the customer purchase information, Tesco could possibly analyze the customer needs and offer customers what they really need. The reselling, cross-selling and up-selling offers have always been adapted by Tesco to their top rated customers.
Introducing the loyalty program as a part of the CRM program has greatly increased the customers of Tesco.com. With its use, Tesco.com had obtained lots of benefits that the competitor didn’t expect.
3.3 CRM to Support its E-Business Strategy
Launching the Tesco.com and the loyalty card, Tesco’s manage to build up the great knowledge of their customer with the prioritization based on the customers purchase, life stage and location. Based on the customer information, marketing strategies were built up stronger. The customers were given offers as they would like to as a result customer satisfactory was rapidly increasing day by day. Moreover, Tesco’s money-off coupon program encouraged customer to buy higher priced products providing them a discount offers.
Tesco get adapted its business expanding more online retails and adding more efficient technologies based on the customers day by day experience. Tesco became the UK’s one of the successful online retailer. Tesco facilitate the customer’s of making the delivery time of their own choices in order to limit the inconvenience of waiting for orders and also customer can modify their ordered items in a specific time before the delivery was to be made. And now Tesco is known to be the world largest online retailer.
4 Legal and Ethical Issues of Tesco.com
The global e-business of Tesco has to make many legal and ethical implications when doing business. For example, selling tobacco and alcohol to under-aged customer is quite unethical and illegal terms of doing business. Trading online globally with the existence of different races and their own culture with different regulations within countries is quite exhausting doing the business terms. As with the importance of ethics and governance laws, Tesco has been fully aware of these two issues which are also reflecting on the e-business of Tesco. With its full awareness, Tesco has been conducting the ethical training relating in its every side of business. Even buyer’s are been giving training relating with the ethical consideration to buyers. But the e-business of Tesco being global, Tesco can face lots of ethical and legal issues as Tesco was charged 38m for selling tobacco in Scotland (Elliott, 2012). As for further selling tobacco globally online, this could harm their business, affecting with these kinds of laws of every countries they have as well as morally. With different races and their culture around the world, people could have different sense of humor regarding tobacco. This could affect the Tesco e-business image can affect by laws of different countries. So, products like tobacco could greatly affect their international business. But on the other side, Tesco has also invested 48 million on the new non-harmful cigarettes which is very impressive strategy of recharging the positive morals about Tesco within customers (Sherwin, 2011). As in the shopping site of Tesco, Tesco has also made age aware to the customer.
5 Conclusion
In recent, Tesco’s e-business has being the UK’s leading internet market and its web site “Tesco.com” is now renowned as the fourth largest grocery store in the world behind Amazon, Dell and Argos. With their unique e-business strategies they apply, they provide products even in the geographically inaccessible regions of the world. The use of data and technology, Tesco has been grown very large in a very short period of time. Its e-business strategy is highly dependent on its website technology and the data they acquire. As successful e-business requires integration of all the applications that has to be built based on principles of effective strategy, retailers like Tesco need to make sure that technology is always concerned with improving the execution of existing business transaction on communication.
In a rapid changing business environment with a high competitor’s pressure, Tesco has to be focused on new strategies in order to sustain its existing market position. Its use of technology in its e-business must adapt the new technologies that they could face in near future. They must be aware of fast changing circumstances and they could be able to adapt in those circumstances as well. Quality strategy formulation are much of the fields they are need to be focused on as its top competitor Asda is been playing strategies in embracing Tesco’s e-business.
Regarding Tesco’s services to their customer, Tesco need to focus of their products prices. Comparing to other online retailers like Sainsbury, Asda, they have been delivering the products to their customer in much lower prices they could possibly deal with. Plus, they have been going with strategies of give high level of discount and saving strategies to their customers as customers always wants to buy best products in much cheaper prices.
Being a large organization, Tesco need to apply different strategies based on their various levels of organization hierarchy. These different levels of strategy should be related and mutually supporting.
6 References
- Chaffey, D 2008, ‘Tesco case study & Tesco.com case study for E-commerce & Internet marketing’, DaveChaffey.com, viewed 13 April 2012,
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- Elliott, L 2012, ‘Tesco to be Charged 38m for Selling Tobacco in Scotland’, International Supermarket News, viewed at 24 April 2012,
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- IVIS Group Ltd. 2005, ‘Tesco.com Product Information Management’, Multi-Channel Experts.
- Inside Scope 2004, ‘Tesco Shines at Loyalty: An Interview With Clive Humby’, CustomerThink viewed 17 April 2012,
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Lankenau, CM, Klein, S & Wehmeyer, K 2004, ‘Developing A Framework For Multi Channel Strategies – An Analysis of Cases From The Grocery Retail Industry’, 17th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, pp.
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Howel, N 2005, ‘Delivering the goods’, New Media Age.
- Office for National Statistics, 2009, ‘Internet Access Households and Individuals’, Office for National Statistics, Available at:
[Last Accessed: 28 March 2012]
- Porter, M. 1980, ‘How competitive forces shape strategy’, The McKinsey Quartely, pp.34-50
- Ritz, 2005, ‘Store wars’, Business Review, Vol. 11, pp.22-23
- Sherwin, A 2011, ‘Leahy invests in ‘safe’ tobacco (after Tesco made a killing on cigarettes)’, The Independent, viewed at 28 April 2012,
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- Scotland, H. 2005, ‘Baby boom gone bust, Policies needed to tackle worryingly low birthrate’, Available at:
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[Last Accessed: 1 April 2012]
- Tomlinson, H. & Evans, R. 2010, ‘Tesco stocks up on inside knowledge of shoppers’, Guardian, Available at:
[Last Accessed: 29 March 2012]
- Turban, E. Rainer, R.K. & Potter, R.E. 2001, ‘Introduction to Information Technology’, Wiley
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Tesco 2011, ‘Annual Report and Financial Statements 2011’, TESCO PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 20011.
Task 2
7 Appendix – Evaluation Finding
Tesco-Careers
- First impression (114/120)
- Navigation (78/80)
- Content (61/100)
- Attractors(23/50)
- Findability(48/60)
- Making contact(46/60)
Tesco-Careers
- First impression (110/120)
- Navigation (87/80)
- Content (76/100)
- Attractors(46/50)
- Findability(40/60)
- Making contact(54/60)
Tesco-Careers
- First impression (114/120)
- Navigation (79/80)
- Content (73/100)
- Attractors(43/50)
- Findability(39/60)
- Making contact(54/60)
Tesco-Careers
- First impression (110/120)
- Navigation (65/80)
- Content (73/100)
- Attractors(42/50)
- Findability(41/60)
- Making contact(52/60)
Tesco-Careers
- First impression (113/120)
- Navigation (74/80)
- Content (66/100)
- Attractors(42/50)
- Findability(35/60)
- Making contact(54/60)
7.1 Summary of Evaluation Findings
With the evaluation done above, it is found that the overall quality of all the five web sites of Tesco is found to be good enough to hold the customer for their online services. The evaluated sites are Tesco direct, Tesco career, Tesco compare, Tesco clothing, and Tesco bank. Being a highly diversified online retailer, the products management is very cleanly done. The products are being categorized in different sites based on the product type. Considering in mind that how web pages must be, they have known the fact of customer like and unlike. For example: customers usually view the shop location fabulousness when they go for clothes shopping. This fabulousness in the shop attracts the customers for shopping in that shop. This concept also refers to the home appliances, furniture, gadget shops that is been provided by Tesco direct. With the known facts of this behavior of human nature, this concept has also been adopted in Tesco direct and Tesco clothing. The design of these web pages is designed considering the need of attractiveness in these two websites of Tesco whereas other sites of Tesco don’t include that much of design as those sites are not much for teenagers. But with the high level of design, their loading performance has been degraded comparing to other web sites such as Tesco Bank, Tesco Careers, etc. The overall sites of Tesco are very cleanly organized that is a plus factor of Tesco web sites. The information provided are very appropriate and sufficient knowing what exactly customer wants. Each of the site has maintained their own site terms and conditions with the availability of news based on the site that customer visits.
As Tesco maintained these sites with highly flexibility in use, one thing that Tesco haven’t considered is the accessibility of one online store to another. One cannot access Tesco clothing while browsing the Tesco career site. Returning to main home page for accessing another site is much of exhausting and annoying experience that can be largely found among the customers. But with the overall evaluation of these sites, only the minor mistakes are being found in these sites. The customer needs has been sufficiently fulfilled in these sites.