Setting up and E-Commerce Site

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Ricki Lambert

E-Commerce Assignment 4

Setting up an E-Commerce Site

Introduction

In the document I shall be looking at e-commerce at a more detailed business level. Firstly I shall be considering why and how an everyday person would set up an e-commerce site. Once this has been achieved I shall write a report giving examples of internet companies which offer e-commerce setup services to client companies. Finally, I will be writing a strategy document for a business to use to implement and support e-commerce trading. I will be taking in to consideration the cost and time and labour resources. This will be inclusive of an analysis model which details how the existing organisational culture will be affected.

Task 1

Setting up an e-commerce website has many positives that make it an attractive proposition to the every day user. The cheap labour costs, the need for little or no lease of property, the day to day running costs and maintenance levels, all kept strictly to a minimum compare do that of the bricks and mortar stores. To further this we have the world wide market to sell our product to, so this can involve selling globally. This is another way to help maximise profits, something that a simple bricks and mortar store couldn’t do. But, how can these types of web sites be implemented and what are the requirements and consideration that’s need to be undertaken when taking on this new venture? Below I shall give my thoughts and list to creating an e-commerce web site.

  1. Before anything, we need to consider firstly, who are our competitors, what are they selling, how much are they selling for and further to this, are we going to be competitive, in other words, will we be bale to compete and have a realistic chance of making a profit. Pretty general considerations, but if not considered then we could be heading down a one way street where money is going to be lost.

  1. We have to now consider the naming of the brand or business, this is important as there are many problems that could arise at this stage. Fir example, if a person wished to call their brand or business Vista, then we could have a problem with patent laws from Microsoft as they have an operating system called this. This is why it’s important to consider our business name before we go any further.

  1. Once the above has been considered and we have drawn up our proposals and deemed there is a gap in the market then we can continue to the next stage. The next stage involves registration. This is a very important consideration if we are to run an internet business legally. There are many legal implications that need to be followed in order for the e-commerce site to be acceptably incorporated in to the business world. To find out what we need to do we must visit the local town hall, the town council, the city council, and the county council. Sometimes we may be obliged to adopt and follow local laws, this may be to do with trading, or delivery’s and so on, and for other businesses it may involve international laws, for example the selling of meat to other countries, the meat may be banned and so on.

  1. What we need to also consider is the address from which the business can be run, for example, in some places like council houses its not appropriate to run a business from, so this may limit the potential of your business, further to this, if there are neighbours we need to consider the posting of goods and items, is this going to impact on them? If so then we need to consider a creation of a P.O Box address. This can be setup by going to the local post office and paying a small fee, from here we have a postal address that avoids conflicting to neighbours.  

  1. Now we have a postal address we need to take on board the fact that standard addresses on the internet may not be appropriate for the amount of mail we are to receive. Internet service providers like BT and Virgin offer the business creators options for commercial services; this provides better security, more space and other features beneficial to the business sector that maybe a home user wouldn’t find necessary. It does however come at a higher rate and this need is to be considered.

  1. As for the business itself it is going to need a firm basis to work from. This may consist of an office, in which case we may need a computer, a chair, a desk, a fax machine a network of computers. The list in endless, in which case we need to budget for these and buy as appropriate, buying unnecessarily however does impact on profit and loss however.

  1. Promoting the business is very important. Setting up the website is going to be costly and we need to have a vast array of things that needs to be done to it, these range from security packages, encryption, to the likes of search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is very important and has to be taken seriously, the better this is done the more change of business we have. On top of this web hosting is an important consideration. Hosting is important as we need to consider the possibilities of expansion, by getting the right web hosting we find the correct balance for space and the more products we could store if we needed to.

  1. We finally move on to the marketing stage. If we have enough money to do so then we cannot afford to over look the process of marketing. Marketing comes in useful for e-commerce sites as it lets people no it exists, the more people that find out about it the better. There are a number of ways this can be done, from Radio broadcasts to television adverts, to simply getting affiliates to brand your logo on their page for a small subscription cost.
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Task 2

Companies have taken it upon themselves to adopt the strategy of setting up other businesses e-commerce websites. By this I mean that for a small subscription cost we can pay another firm to do the work for us. Let’s have a look at what some of the firms are offering and how we can go about the setup stage.

There are two parts to selling on the Net. Firstly we have the task of getting people to your site, and selling to them once they get there. Both need a combination of technical and ...

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