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Week 10

Q.15 Imagine that you are the manager responsible for e-commerce in your selected e-business. As E-Commerce Manager, you have been asked to investigate Knowledge Management, assess its suitability as a tool to retain key corporate knowledge, and produce a report on these two aspects. Please summarise the key findings of this report in your blog posting this week. Make sure that it is specific to your company and your company’s market sector.

 Knowledge management is the Process responsible for gathering, analysing, storing and sharing knowledge and information within an Organisation. Success in an increasingly competitive marketplace depends critically on the quality of knowledge which organisations apply to their key business processes. For example the supply chain depends on knowledge of diverse areas including raw materials, planning, manufacturing and distribution and product development requires knowledge of consumer requirements, new science, new technology, marketing etc. Knowledge management is a good way for property pal to gather,analyse and store information on their buisness. This in return for the buisness will help improve profit and revenue within the buisness. It will also retain key talent and expertise in the buisness. It will also help property pal to defend market share against new entraints. Property pal will also get the chance to penetrate new market segmants and reduse costs. This can also lead to property pal to develop new services in their buisness.

“Details of processes and procedures. Explicit knowledge can be readily detailed in procedural manuals and databases. Examples include records of meetings between sales representatives and key customers, procedures for dealing with customer service queries and management reporting processes.”

 

Week 9

Q.14 ‘Traffic building’ is the process of increasing the number of people who will visit an e-commerce web site. It covers many of the techniques shown in the ‘green’ boxes on slide 10 of this week’s (week 9 CRM) slides. Specifically for your chosen web site, describe the main types of online marketing communications that it could use for traffic building. Justify how each of these types is applicable to your site.

There are a few methods that property pal could use to increase the number of people who visits their site and i am going to talk about them in detail. The first method i am going to talk about is search marketing and search engine optimizationand this would benifit property pal as usually the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it ranks the more searchers will visit that site.

Below is a graph of a company that monitered SEO in their buisness when they introduced it to their company and the effects howed that traffic increased.

Graph came from “http://freedig.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html“

I would not recommend property pal to use pay per click as they are a small buisness paying for people to view their website.

I would also recomend property pal to use offline communications as a way of traffic building on their website. A few ways of doing this that i feel would be a suitable are advertising in newspapers and also maybe sponing an event or sports team. Also direct mail, exhibitons and worrd of moth are good ways to get property pals webstite more users browsing their pages. Online partnerships would alos help traffic building and they have started to do this as they have teamed up with an Omagh estate agents and alos they have some large companies advertising on teir site such as sky and PC world.

Interactive ads and viral marketing would not be two that i would reccomend that much although display ads/banners and passing along emails would help build their traffic on propertypal.com. Even tho Property pal is not one of the leading property websites the points that i have talk about would help traffic building on their website.

Week 8

Q.13 For your selected e-commerce site, assess the ease (or not) with which you can find the site using a search engine. Type some of the company’s branded products or key themes into a search engine. Discuss what is returned. Pay particular attention to ‘paid for’ results. Also, check where competitors appear. Interpret the results. Provide recommendations.

When on one of the largest search engines on the internet i have found out that when i typed property pal into their search engine their website appeared first on the list. This makes it very easy to find their website if a customer or user new the name of their site. I then typed in buy property into googles search engine as an experiment to see how far down the list their website would be. The result is that their website is not in the top ten pages so if a customer would not get their site as they would be board browsing after the tenth page and the same goes for when i typed in buy property in Ireland. I have found out that propertynews.com, daft.ie and propertyfile.net are the main search results when it comes to looking for property in Ireland.

The diagram below shows me searching for propertypal on the internet and also it shows when property pal is typed in the search engine it appears first on the results.

 

All the searching i have done and i have not found one link to property pal that has being payed for that appears on the right hand side. I also searched for a house in the area i am from and the results i got back are not good for property pal as they were no were to be seen in the results. I would recomend that property pal pay Google and other search engines so that their pages can be accesed more easily as this will help them against competition. The only way customers will every access their website if if they are told about it or move up in googles pecking order

Week 7

Q.12 Carry out web research to find out what is meant by the term ‘Cloud Computing’. Describe in your own words what is meant by this term. Explain in your own words the impact that cloud computing might have in e-commerce. Ensure that you describe potential benefits and problems.

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. All this colectively together is called “the cloud”. Using a thin client or other access point allows computing at the scale of the cloud allows users to access supercomputer level power. An iPhone, BlackBerry or laptop allows users to reach into the cloud for resources as they need them. Cloud computing is often used to sort through enormous amounts of data and  Google has an initial edge in cloud computing precisely because of its need to produce instant, accurate results for millions of incoming search inquries every day.

Picture of how cloud computing works. source http://communication.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing.htm/printable

Advantages of using cloud computing.

Clients would be able to access their applications and data from anywhere at any time. They could access the cloud computing system using any computer linked to the internet. Cloud computing systems would bring down the costs on hardware and clients would not have to buy the fastest computers with the most memory.

Disadvantages of using cloud computing.

The biggest concerns about cloud computing are privacy and security and the idea of handing over important data to another company worries some people.

Week 6

Q.11 Using your chosen e-commerce company, analyse their strategy for management of the upstream and downstream supply chain.
Concepts that should be included are as follows:

• Push vs pull supply models
• Vertical integration vs disintegration vs virtual integration
• Partnership management and value networks
• Procurement and fulfilment strategies

Push vs pull supply models

Property Pal use push and pull models to sell their houses and firstly i am going to talk about push model. Property pal get the house information and then put this information on their website for customers to view. Using the pull model property pal get house and other details and feedback from their customers and estate agents and then they put it this on the website for other customers to view.

Vertical integration vs disintegration vs virtual integration

Property Pal uses information and communication to allow to provide a customized service by outsourcing production and other functions to third parties. The characteristics of property pal using virtual organisations is that use of communication technology, flexible and responsive and reliance on structure.

Partnership management and value networks

Property Pal are a growing company and to show this they have brought mortgage and property plus omagh so it shows they are a growing buisness. The aim of is to improve the competitiveness and prosperity of their buisness organizations

Procurement and fulfilment strategies

Property pal have Procurement and fulfilment strategies in their buisness and this has played a fundamental role in helping companies reach the goals of “supply chain integration”. The Internet changes the role and type of relationships between the various players, creating new value networks and developing new business models.

Week 5

Q.10

Your assignment in week 5 is an e-business strategy assignment. Consider the strategic impact on your website in each of these ‘five force’ areas and write a little bit on each. So for the company you have chosen, please write a short blog posting (around 250-500 words max in total for all five areas) looking at each of these five areas. For example if you have chosen www.dabs.com, then write 50-100 words on the ‘threat of substitutes’, then 50-100 words on ‘bargaining power of customers’, and so on.

Porter’s five forces analysis helps the marketer to contrast a competitive environment.

The threat of substitute products

Property pal is a company that advertises house for customer and other companies and Internet technology enables faster introduction of products and services so another company could come along and make their buisness website easier to use and cheaper services. Increased services introduced by other companies may reduce customers and profit.

The threat of entry of new competitors

If new laws were to be brought out by the goverment this could allow more competitors into the market and take away customers. The internet is a easy way of creating a buisness than on the high street so my company Property Pal could have competition growing every day so services they provide for example the price of allowing customers to recieve texts to be lowered so profits are lowered.

The intensity of competitive rivalry

The competitive rivalry for property pal will increase because of the internet and allow buisnesess to  have the same services so prices in the buisnesess will drop and so will profits. The property market at the minute is on a downfall and prices of houses are going down and so people cant sell their houses. This is all to do with the econmy and if houses are not selling well then this s going to have an effect on property pal.

The bargining power of customers

Customers and companies looking to put their houses on property pal can look for cheaper and better services because of the internet and so prices are going to be lowered as the market is competitive and also the econmy is poor at the minute so customers are going to look for the cheaper option to save money.

The bargining power of suppliers

The increasing number of companies selling property allows companies to view property pal’s website and viewing how good the site works and the layout of the site against its competitors. This allows property pal to have an advantage and so more companies and customers want to advertise on their website.

Internet Usage in the UK

Statistics on internet Usage in the UK

 

As I have being researching the statistics on internet usage in the UK I have found out that the number of users on the internet has grown over the past few years and keeps growing every year. In 2008 65% (28 million) of households in Great Britain had access to the internet and that is an increase of 7% (1 million) in just one year http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=8. Also in 2008 56% of all households in Great Britain had a broadband connection and from 2007 it has risen 5%.

 

The graph below shows the increase of internet users since 2002 to 2008.

 

 

(Figure 1)

 

 

Mobile phones are one of the most popular gadgets that people use and after researching mobile phone internet usage I have found that there are a total of 7.4 million mobile internet users in the UK, that’s 12% of all mobile phone users. Another interesting fact that I have found that from 2006-2007 the number of page views from mobile devices has went up by 16%. Technology is growing every day and the internet especially is going to grow and grow and with broadband becoming cheaper,easier to get, faster more and more people will be on the internet if not through  their PC’s and laptops then it will be mobile phones and ipods.

 

The graph below show the UK mobile phone users that use mobile phone internet and dont use mobile phone internet.

Figure 2 from http://www.yes-no-cancel.co.uk/2008/02/20/some-mobile-internet-usage-statistics/

 

(Figure 2)

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