Opportunities to analyse Online Competitors
It is much more simple and fast to ‘spy’ or see how and what your competitors are doing online then actually going to the store to compare your business to theirs. Long before a business has gone online it should check out the online webpages of all of its main competing businesses. So you can see the layout of their webpage, the size of it and what it has in it. This is to ensure your webpage is to a similar level or even better. Also take in mind your competitors can also ‘spy’ on your company once you are online. The task at hand is to get your webpage at the top of its game and to keep it there.
Marketing Benefits
This is the advantages receives for knowing more about its customers, contacting them more rapidly and more simply and offering every aspect to their customer’s needs.
Collecting market research information from online enquiries
There are a lot of ways were companies can retrieve user’s information from its website:
Using log files and cookies: Both of these methods collect data using the usage of the site by the users, this can provide the business with very important marketing information. Users can block cookies so there not accepted but many sites refuse to work without cookies. However, all sites produce log files. These are files made by the web server that hosts the website. They give information like how many people have visited the site and how long they visited the site for.
Website activity software: This produces more information from the log files. It can also tell you which search engine are the best at attracting customers for your business. They can find out using website activity software, which is the favourite of the pages and which one is least liked.
Registration and order forms: Many sites ask users to register or make an account; this is so they can access user’s information. They also offer users an extra thing if they agree to receive regular emails from the site for example a special offer on an item. This offers the site owners with valiable information about the user that they can use.
Access to new markets
When taking your business online no matter the size of your business, you will be able to grow to reach a wider range of potential customers.
Remote locations
The internet has become a new way of buying with out the need to exit your home. This means customers can purchese wanted items from the comfort of there house, no matter how far the shopping centre is, this provides those who live in locations which are almost blocked out such as, the islands around the United Kingdom have a much larger selection of goods and services to be provided to them.
Customers with travel difficulties
People who live in urban areas, have cost problems, mothers with young babies and even the elderly find it very easy to order online as they have difficulties traveling around to get what they need or want. So buying online is their favourite choice especially when the weather is not particulary good which many times is the case.
Poor Transport links
In many areas, especially small rural areas, the bus services are hardly available or they are really bad and train services are almost unseen or used. While in special moments using such services should be worth getting most amounts of time quick and easy online purcheses are much more painless and time consuming. Customers with disabilities and can not travel at all will find shopping online a very important invention as this makes it unbelivably easy for them.
Access from a wide range of devices
Modern day technology has made it easy to shop from anywhere on the go. Smart devices such as internet phones or PDAs or Pocket PCs have provided customers an even simpler and quicker way to shop from absloutly any where and any time.
Level of response
The speed of a company’s response and how many customers they can respond to at one given time have factors which affect it such as;
Sales features
This can either mean home delivery, delivery to a different adress then the buyers or the option to pick when you as a customer want the item to be delivered.
Access from a wide range of devices
This would mean making the site with different servers to support multiple devices not only PCs. This would mean making it smaller and easier to use in handheld devices such as mobile phones and ipads or other advanced technology.
Access out of business hours
Help pages which are previously written to answer the most asked questions, or a blogging page where customers can answer each others questions and help each other, would mean that customers can get 24 hour assistance daily without the need of a member of the staff team being in attendance.
Access from around the world
Business who plan to sell globaly or plan to provide services on a global scale can do so in a quick and easy way online and customers can access the information they need from anywhere in the world.
Rapid response to orders and enquires
Email services and the usage of customers needing to register means the responce can be far more quick. Websites that sell such as ebay, not only use email providers to message you they also have there own messaging service which would mean far more quicker response and the chance of the customer spotting it a lot more higher.
Online order tracking
Postages can be tracked and followed on a real life time map which follows the journey of the delivery of the customers order. This is done by attaching a tracking device or chip to the postage. Customers can follow this progress on either partner websites or the website having there own application which shows them this information.
Financial advantages
Improved cash flow through fewer bad debts
Less thefts and tricks can be used if it is online. As the customer has to provide the debit or credit card details before purchase and the money is taking off accordingly to the delivery of the item in the b2c transactions you will not have to worry about not being paid or being tricked as much.
Freedom of low-cost location
Having a complete online business will mean you can have your delivery head quarters or base in cheap locations. For example, HMV and Tesco have theres in Jersey which has lower tax then the one in the UK which means they save money.
Lower overheads
The amount of staff needed are much more less in an online business, so less pay checks will mean more money for the company. Online companies use call centres to help customers even these can be automatic and previously recorded. This can greatly save a business in cost.
Rapid payment
To be able to purchase items online you need to make payments quickly, ‘one click payments’. This will mean a business can govern there money and control there cash flow with more ease and it will disable the need to loan money.
No expensive cash handling
The seller doesn’t have real cash to deal with instead the money is transferred from the buyers account to the seller’s bank account. This will protect seller against fraud or theft and make it easier to sort your money out plus the cost of storing the cash out is removed.
Ease of entry
Making your entrance into a new and a wider scaled market is far easier online. The internet has provided small business with huge posibilities to grow like the big organisations and it offers them the chance to compete with them and maybe get further and more larger then them.
