E-Business Distribution Systems and Value Strategies

E-Business Distribution Systems and Value Strategies Srishti Mittal What is a business portal? Ans. The term business portal is used to describe a feature on a company website that allows authorized users to access restricted content or information. This tool is growing in popularity, as it provides a single gateway for staff to access different applications. Some of the most common features of a business portal include customer relationship management, expense submissions, recording of staff time, and requesting vacation days. The technology required to create and maintain a business portal has decreased significantly in price in the past few years, making it much more feasible for both small and medium size enterprises. There are two primary aspects to the creation of a business portal: hardware and software. The hardware used varies widely, depending on the applications that are going to be distributed via this tool, the target user group, number of users, and reliance on other systems. The greater the number of users and the more robust the services, the more hardware that is required to support them. Many projects begin as a proof of concept, and then quickly expand. Make sure your hardware is sized to meet the needs of your users. What is meant by the term co-opetition? Ans. Coopetition or Co-opetition (sometimes spelled coopertition or co-opertition) is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition. Basic principles of co-opetitive structures have been described in game theory, a scientific field that received more attention with the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the works of John Forbes Nash on non-cooperative games. It is also applied in the fields of political science and economics and even universally [works of V. Frank Asaro, J.D.: Universal Co-opetition,2011, and The Tortoise Shell Code, novel, 2012]. Coopetition occurs when companies interact with partial congruence of interests. They cooperate with each other to reach a higher value creation if compared to the value created without interaction, and struggle to achieve competitive advantage. What is a first mover? Ans. In marketing, first-mover advantage or FMA is the advantage gained by the initial (first-moving) significant occupant of a market segment. It may be referred to as Technological Leadership. This advantage may stem from the fact that the first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match Sometimes, the first mover is not able to capitalize on its advantage, leaving the opportunity for another firm to gain second-mover advantage. What is meant by a frictionless market? Ans. A Frictionless market is a financial market without transaction costs. Friction is a type of market incompleteness. Every complete market is frictionless, but the converse does not hold. In a frictionless market the solvency cone is the halfspace normal to the unique price vector. The Black-Scholes model assumes a frictionless market. What does SWOT stand for? Ans. The abbreviation SWOT is commonly used in reference to strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. SWOT may also stand for Sydney welcome orientation and transition, student with outstanding talent, study without teacher or special weapons for operations timelines. Exercises: List the strategic alternatives can e-business businesses are using. Ans. Business environments are highly uncertain and executives need to be innovative and flexible to survive. They achieve this through strategic alternatives that enable their companies to maintain a competitive edge over rivals. For instance, executives can adapt through safer small investments or risky and costly changes, according to the Harvard Business Review. Some alternative strategies include price focus, differentiation, diversification and adjacent businesses. Price Focus Price focus is a market niche strategy where a company competes on cost. This strategy targets a small buyer segment and the company needs to have a low-cost structure compared to rivals. This strategy is effective when a business is new, it cannot pursue a bigger market, customer segments are different, or when no other competitor is focusing on the targeted segment. Differentiation In cases where competition is stiff because of the proliferation of similar products, a company can come up with features that differentiate their products or services from those of rivals. The differentiating features need to be valuable to customers so that they are ready to pay premiums for them, and difficult for rivals to copy. When introducing new features, executives need to ensure that the product is affordable and that it complements customer’s needs. What advantages can pioneering firms gain? Ans. One of the most valuable competitive brand strategies any company can undertake is what I refer to as the Pioneer Advantage. The Pioneer Advantage is what the name implies: being first to enter an emerging market or creating a new market altogether. Business history is full of pioneer companies that have outsold the latecomers for years. Market pioneers Coca-Cola, Tide, Pitney-Bowes, Lipton Tea, and Levi Strauss continue to be the best selling or most profitable brands in their categories. The competitive advantages are significant for the market pioneer. One of the most significant advantages the pioneer owns is product awareness. There is much research that shows that buyers do not recall all brands equally. The customer is more familiar with certain brands over others and they will recall those brands more easily. The Pioneer is most likely the highest profile of any brand in the category and, as a result, it is often recalled first. How can an e-business build barriers to other businesses? Ans. Today, people often turn to the Internet first for information about businesses and products – whether they are shopping online, or simply looking for a business’ address or phone number – making an online presence one of the most important assets for any business; not just to share information, but to build credibility. According to a recent survey of millions of consumers by Weebly, 56 percent said they do not trust a business without a website. List some of the advantages of having a brand name. Ans. Successful brand-building helps profitability by â€Å"adding values† that customers are prepared to pay for. Strong brands inspire customer loyalty leading to repeat sales and word-of mouth recommendation. The brand owner can usually charge higher prices, especially if the brand is the market leader. Better access to distribution retailers, distributors and other sellers usually want to stock top selling brands. With limited shelf space it is more likely the top brands will be on the shelf than less well-known brands What are some of the advantages of having large amounts of resources for competing on the Internet? Ans. competition is the rivalry among sellers trying to achieve such goals as increasing profits, market share, and sales volume by varying the elements of the marketing mix: price, product, distribution, and promotion. Merriam-Webster defines competition in business as the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party by offering the most favorable termsIt was described by Adam Smith n The Wealth of Nations (1776) and later economists as allocating productive resources to their most highly-valued uses and encouraging efficiency. Smith and other classical economist before Cournot were referring to price and non-price rivalry among producers to sell their goods on best terms by bidding of buyers, not necessarily to a large number of sellers nor to a market in final equilibrium. Later microeconomic theory distinguished between perfect competition and imperfect competition, concluding that no system of resource allocation is more Pareto efficient hand perfect competition. Competition, according to the theory, causes commercial firms to develop new products, services and technologies, which would give consumers greater selection and better products. The greater selection typically causes lower prices for the products, compared to what the price would be if there was no competition (monopoly) or little competition (oligopoly). It is generally accepted that competition results in lower prices and a greater number of goods delivered to more people. Less competition is perceived to exhibit higher prices with a fewer number of goods delivered to fewer people. Describe the different types of Internet portals and whom they target. Ans. A portal may use a search engine API to permit users to search intranet content as opposed to extranet content by restricting which domains may be searched. Apart from this common search engines feature, web portals may offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock quotes, and information from databases and even entertainment content. Portals provide a way for enterprises and organizations to provide a consistent look and feel it access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different web entities at various URLs. The features available may be restricted by whether access is by an authorized and authenticated user (employee, member) or an anonymous site visitor. Examples of early public web portals were AOL, Excite, Netvibes, iGoogle, MSN, Naver, Indiatimes, Rediff, Sify and Yahoo.. See for example, the My Yahoo! feature of Yahoo! which may have inspired such features as the later Google iGoogle (soon to be discontinued.) The configurable side-panels of, for example, the modern Opera browser and the option of Speed Dial pages by most browsers continue to reflect the earlier portal metaphor. How can firms use alliances and acquisitions to gain advantages? Ans. A strategic alliance is when two or more businesses join together for a set period of time. The businesses, usually, are not in direct competition, but have similar products or services that are directed toward the same target audience. Alliance means cooperation between groups that produces better results that can be gained. Because competitive markets keep improving what you can get from transactions, an alliance must stay ahead of the market by making continuous advances.1 Strategic alliance is a primary form of strategic alliance is a partnership between firms whereby resources, capabilities, and combined to pursue mutual interests. Professional Development: Choose and industry. Develop a business model for how that industry currently operates and then develop an e-business based model. Identify how this new model can gain a competitive advantage over other models in the industry. Ans. Amazon is a classic business model, it uses the Internet to get maximum leverage out of its fixed assets, and once it achieves enough volume of sales, the sum total of profits from all those sales exceed its fixed cost base, and it turns a profit. It already has exceeded this hurdle in its past. References Kleindl, B. (2002). Strategic electronic marketing : managing e-business. Cleveland, Ohio: Thomson/South-Western.