Strategic & Tactical Tools for Ebusiness

Use of Internet and Web to transact business.

--> Digitally enabled commercial transactions between and among organizations and individuals

E-business: digital enabling of transactions and processes within a firm

E-buss turn into e-commerce when exchange of value occurs

Business:

• all forms of e-comm (retail e/m, social network, on-demand, B2B) continue to show very strong growth;
• Social, mobile, digital advertising

Technology:

• Mobile / cloud computing, IoT, Big Data, 
• Mobile is king and new technologies help to build the mobile platform. Data flood is leveraged by analytics.

Society:

• User-generated content, privacy issues, digital copyright, taxation, surveillance, online security
• Conflicts over copyright, privacy, security threats

--> fundamental change to traditional commerce (information asymmetry, fixed prices, sales-force driven etc)

1.Ubiquity

• Available everywhere and all the time
• Alters industry structure by creating new marketing channels and expanding size of overall market. Creates new efficiencies in industry operations and lowers costs of firms’ sales operations. Enables new differentiation strategies

2.Global reach

• Reach = the total number of users or customers an e-commerce business can obtain
• Changes industry structure by lowering barriers to entry, but greatly expands market at the same time. Lowers cost of industry and firm operations through production and sales efficiencies. Enables competition on a global scale

3.Universal standards

• lowers market entry costs for merchants, reduces search costs for consumers, price discovery becomes simpler as prices and product descriptions are displayed, network externalities arise (mutual gains on consumer and seller side from using the same technology)

4.Information richness

• Complexity and content of a message

5.Interactivity

• Technology enables two-way communication between merchant and consumer
• Alters industry structure by reducing threat of substitutes through
  enhanced customization.

6.Information density

• The total amount and quality of information available to all market participants -> Information become less expensive and of better quality, more transparency on prices and costs, merchants can segment and target specific customer groups based on data

7.Personalization/customization

• Personalization = targeting of marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person’s name, interests, and past purchases
• Customization = changing the delivered product or service based on a user’s preferences or prior behavior
• Alters industry structure by reducing threats of substitutes, raising barriers to entry.

8.Social technology

• user-generated content and social networks

• B2C, B2B (most $),
• C2C, Mobile e-commerce (use of mobile devices to enable online transactions),
• social e-commerce (e-commerce enabled by social networks and online social relationships),
• local e-commerce (focused on engaging the consumer based his or her current geographic location)

Evolution of multi/cross-channel retailing to encompass all digital and social technologies

Customers can examine, access, purchase, and return goods from any channel, even change channels during process, and receive timely info at each stop in each channel

Economies of scale

•  inverse relationship between fixed costs and output / a proportionate saving in costs gained by an increased level of production
• used to be a competitive advantage (mass production --> lower costs), but is changing due to technologies (platforms and on-demand technologies)

Economies of unscale

• instead of offering a mass product, offering customized, smaller solutions that are targeted to specific customers due to emergence of platforms and on-demand tech (AI, cloud etc)

Interconnected network of thousand of networks, millions of computers, linking businesses, educational inst, and individuals