Operational Risks for Online Businesses
Operational Risks Website Updating Websites need updating regularly so that the information provided is current and product descriptions and lists are accurate. There is nothing worse than for a customer to see pages that have not been amended for a year or more. In some cases incorrect or out-of-date information can create serious problems. Payment Security Most online customers expect to be able to pay for goods they buy by debit or credit card. However, they also have to be certain that their personal details will be kept confidential. Newspaper headlines about fraud, hackers and identity theft obviously put people off. To be secure, all online payments need to be: * Private and confidential between the buyer and the seller * Authentic because both people are who they claim to be * Conveyed intact and without any changes or alterations during transmission * Erased from the system after process has been completed Errors in Ordering Orders forms should be designed to be as fool-proof as possible to minimise customer errors. The site should also be designed to prevent customers making obvious mistakes, such as cloning an order by submitting the same order form twice. Unfamiliar Trading Conditions These can affect both the business and its customers. The main reason online trading was pretty slow to take off was because customers were worried about purchasing
Online Businesses. Comparing Which, the BBC and Firebox.
Ass 1 Unit 21 Task 1 a, b & c Which.co.uk The first business organisation I have chosen to describe is Which?, which I believe is a non-profitable organisation. Which? Aims to inform the public on what products are worth buying and which are not. It also reviews services, e.g. breakdown services, pubs and bars and TV services. Which? Has been around for a while and has a reputation you can trust and it has impartial reviews. They carry out extensive product testing, not just to see how they look or perform, but to establish how reliable they are to live with considering their every day use. They test things like functionality, noisiness and ease of use. They also have campaigns like consumer rights and banking charges. This is an example of the homepage for washing machine reviews. It has the ones that are so bad, you are advised not to get them (scores of around 20%). The best buys are about 75% and upwards which are not necessarily the cheapest or most expensive, but are the most reliable and overall best. They have 4 or 5 paragraphs of reviews , pointing out all the good and bad points, saying who would benefit from the product and who wouldn't and they put manufacturer's claims to the test. This is their scoring system. They have stars out of 5 and percentages next to them, with a filtering system which allows you to filter by brand, price range, score
Online Trends
Online Trends Eric LeSieur October 10, 2010 With the ever-continuing growth of the internet, consumers' online habits change and morph accordingly. Traditionally, e-mail and portal sites were the main focus of internet users' time. Today, the trend has shifted towards a higher use of social networking sites. This change in consumer habits has forced online retailers to reassess the ways in which they advertise and operate. Long gone are the days of signing on to AOL through a dial-up connection, listening to those garbled sounds of a modem, and connecting to the internet at a god awful speed of 56k. As of 2009 the internet in the United States has an average speed of 5.1mps (US Ranks 28th, 2009). This explosion in speed over the past few years has given online users instant access, though high-speed connections, to high quality, interactive content such as social network sites, video sharing sites such as You Tube, and a much more robust shopping experience. November 2007 was the first indication that a shift was occurring. At this time online video use exceeded email use for the first. This was followed up by social networking in February 2009, also exceeding email use (Wayne, 2009). What appears to be happening is online content is becoming more and more robust with the availability of faster access and faster download times on the consumers' end. This
Online Advertising
4. Online Advertising 4.1 Publishing a World Wide Web Virtually every major company around the globe now focus on the Internet's explosive growth.1 Businesses have realised that the Internet reflects a new, very popular market, in which a company has to participate in order to stay competitive in the long run. As a result, various company web sites have sprouted on the World Wide Web at a phenomenal rate, and more importantly web sites have become an increasingly popular way to advertise a company's services.2 In this case, promoting web sites is vital in order to attract visitors or even potential customers. However, the goal of a business' site shouldn't be to just get masses of people to the site. It should also be to get people to buy their products. 4.2 Importance of Online Advertising While the number of new Home Pages grows exponentially every month, it is getting more and more difficult to find a particular business site. According ro AdRelevance, the number of company web pages has more than doubled since January -- growing by 157 percent over the past ten months.3 ..... I have added this sentence written in bold.... In this context, advertising plays a crucial role in making a bussiness page known on the web. It is not only cheap and flexible but it also allows exposure to a vast audience. The basic model for advertisement is based on the
Online Business
BTEC NATIONAL DIPLOMA IN BUSINSS Online Business I have chosen Superdrug as my company to base my assignment on. Every business has aims and objectives to meet, but the main objectives of most businesses are: To increase profits - having an online business enables you to target those people who you possibly couldn't reach before by just having a store, this would just provide an easy access to those people e.g. disabled people. Being online attracts thousands of people to your website which would result in sales increasing rapidly and having global audience can also increase your profits. The other thing that Superdrug should do is to lower their current products prices in order to compete with their competitors and to attract their competitor's customers to their online shopping website. Online businesses pay less rent because they don't need to be located in busy and expensive location e.g. High Street. Having a website for Superdrug would enable them to be worldwide recognised and their brand/logo will be much better known. Online businesses often buy straight from the producer/manufacture, meaning that they pay less for products. To increase sales - online websites targets a wider range of audience e.g. 52 million internet users. By having a website means that customers will be constantly shopping from Superdrug at any time and any day (24/7 shopping). Customers
business online
Task 1 In the report I will be investigating why it is important to have a business online, how it affects the business and the importance to investors and other businesses. I have chosen two businesses to research how being online helps them what their aims and objectives are A) 1. The online business I've chosen is Amazon 2. The super market I've chosen is Tesco B) Amazon.co.uk is famous for selling books but the turn over wasn't making enough profit, but now they sell other stuff like from cameras to coffee machines, exercise videos to Elvis CDs, they say there's something for everyone. They also enable independent sellers to sell new and used items on their website via Amazon.co.uk Marketplace. Within Amazon.co.uk you are able to use a variety of resources to help you make your choice, this including customer reviews and personal recommendations. The Amazon Associates program was the first online affiliate program of its kind when it launched in 1996. Today, it is the largest and most successful online affiliate program, with over 1,000,000 members world-wide Customer Focused - Amazon seeks to be the world's most customer-centric company, a place where people can find and discover anything they might want to buy online. Previously Amazon only sold books, music and toys, as they found out that they weren't even breaking even so they decided based their company
Online shopping
Online services The internet provides a vast array of online services. The internet can provide services on a variety of different subjects whether it is concerned with communication, education, entertainment etc. This is why increasing number of people are using online services rather than the alternatives already offered. In this section I will be investigating five different online services available on the internet and try to give a comprehensive picture of their benefits but also the limitation of such services on the internet. Services cover a wide range of information on the internet therefore I will use one service from each of the five types of services. The services that I will be investigating are listed below; Online Shopping Online shopping is simply when a customer buys products from the internet. Online shopping has grown more popular with customers as people are finding shopping online more efficient and as most will be using the internet in their homes it allows them to shop in a comfortable environment. Many companies now have online websites where you are able to buy the same products from the internet as in the actual stores in the high street. Here is an example of how online shopping may work: This is an example of how online shopping works when using the Tesco website. The first thing that you must do is register and in this case giving details
Business Online
Introduction In order to investigate my assignment I am going to conduct a research of an organisation that has an online presence, and I am going to compare my chosen business with a different business that doesn't have an online presence. An online presence means setting up a Web site for your business. The Web site may have a variety of functions, ranging from promoting the company to a wider audience, offering support/advice or selling products and services through e-commerce. The business I have selected to base my Online Presence Assignment is on Tesco. Jack Cohen, who served with the Royal Air Force during the First World War, founded Tesco. After returning in 1919, 21-year-old Jack invested 30 pounds of his reward for military service to buy surplus food stockpiles and he opened a little stall in East London. On the first day he had a four-pound turnover and one pound profit. Little by little, his business started to boom and Jack expanded to other markets all over London. He also began wholesale trade. Slowly this business expanded and at this present time it's the leading supermarket across Britain and also a multinational company and trading in a multiplicity of different countries, Tesco has also begun to further develop into selling not just grocery but also in other operations such as insurance policies and mortgages, gasoline retailing (Tesco express), small
Whatever one may think of its long-term prospects, Amazon.com clearly stands in today's front rank of online businesses.
Whatever one may think of its long-term prospects, Amazon.com clearly stands in today's front rank of online businesses. It can legitimately claim to be the first of the Web bookstores to reach a global mass market, to be "Earth's largest bookstore," and to have delivered significant value to shareholders, with an eighteen-month stock-price return in excess of 1,300%. These superlatives aside, Amazon continues to help define the Internet as a consumer environment, with rules, limits, and opportunities often different from those experienced in physical channels. Operating under assumptions at variance with conventional retailers, Amazon is a harbinger of successful business practices in a connected economy. To anticipate this study's main points, they are the following: * Amazon uses software connected to a network to understand then meet customer needs for information goods. Prime goals are thus to increase the power of the software and the reach of the network, then to expand the scope of goods offered. One outcome of this outlook is a conscious decision to invest in reach (in the form of market share and penetration) at the cost of short-term profitability. * Outside of this core capability, Amazon tends to connect to resources that give it scale rather Than adding internal physical mass. Amazon's leadership team understands increasing returns economics as exemplified in
describe the opportunities for greater processing efficiency, enhanced competitiveness, and increased service support that businesses would benefit from having an online presence.
TASK 1 I am an E-commerce consultant and I have been asked to write an article on the benefits of an online presence. In this part of my assignment, I am going to describe the opportunities for greater processing efficiency, enhanced competitiveness, and increased service support that businesses would benefit from having an online presence. . Opportunities for greater processing efficiency that is improving a range of business process from the organisation of the supply of goods, through to simplifying work and how it is carried out. My website sells music online, it has an effective on-line presence as it attracts young people to the site because it is advertising and promoting young bands. It is a highly efficient tool that can be used in a variety of ways to make business work better. For example I can direct my consumers to You Tube to view Britney Spears videos, Rihanna and other artists. The supply chain management and the tracking of orders on-line could be used in the future as the site at the moment is just promoting the viewing of tracks. Online sites have to have a secure payment management system E.g. Payment on-line. The reason for this I will be taking customer credit card details and they must be protected under the DPA and fraud. Tracking orders This is going to be beneficial for my website, as it Enables on-line order tracking. My site will track
