E-Commerce

In the fast pace world we live in today, when potential customers come to our website we want to make sure they return to use the website again. There are several items that must be addressed in P.O.D. e-Commerce Business to customer website one of is to have repeat customers is performance and service. “A site must be efficiently designed for ease of access, shopping, and buying, with sufficient server power and network capacity to support website traffic” (O’Brien & Marakas, 2007, p. 294). Some thing that will need to be addressed is how big the server should be that will be used to power the site. If we anticipate our site to have a high volume of customers, we will need to decide how many customers our server handles before it crashes. No matter what we do to increase our site’s performance, we will face the reality of what the customer perceives as high performance and efficiency. With this site, we will have to continue to stay on the cutting edge of technology to keep our customers coming back to our site. P.O.D. wants consumers to come to our site and navigate quickly through their selections in building their cellular phones. When they first come to the sight we can reduce the graphic file sizes to allow the page to populate faster, for example, reducing the amount of images and making them as small as possible, which will also help in the site’s performance.

Not only will we need to address the performance of our website, we also need to have strategies to ensure that customers are attracted to our site. The importance of understanding the crucial elements of customer relationship management (CRM) becomes increasingly clear when one considers there is no person-to-person opportunity to form relationships in an e-business. We must therefore depend on elements of the customer-to-website interaction to deliver a satisfying relationship. “CRM allows a business to identify and target their best customers…so they can be retained as lifelong customers for greater and more profitable services” (O’Brien & Marakas, 2007, p. 242).

The question is how do we get customers to visit our website? We would have to take the perspective of our website being the face of our e-Commerce business. Looking at what we offer, purchasing a cellular phone on-demand to customers’ specification require our site to be informative. Our site must meet the needs and wants of the customer. CRM “makes possible real-time customization and personalization of products and services based on customer wants, needs, buying habits, and life cycles” (O’Brien & Marakas, 2007, p. 242). Customers should have an easy flow from the building process through checkout. Next, we would have to consider how they would find our site; maybe through another site or through one of the search engines available on the internet. Advertising our web address is one way of getting customers to visit our site. Publishing our address on business cards, even advertising on highly visible sites like Google or Yahoo would help us get new customers. The problem with this strategy is it’s expensive. Another method would be to offer incentives to customers if they purchase from our site. The incentives could be free shipping, some kind of internet discount like 20 percent off their next purchase. Customers surfing through the internet for deals on competing websites look for incentives in helping them decide what website to purchase from. The outcome of putting these strategies to work may differ depending on what works or not.

Is our site meeting its goals -- making money, reaching prospects, satisfying stakeholders -- in order to know when and what to change? We cannot determine whether our strategies are working unless we make the effort to measure results. Our company needs to survey its customers continually to learn if our website meets their needs. Taking the pulse of the market will alert our site to early shifts, and let it capitalize on the changes rather than react to them after the fact. All our company’s products and services must be periodically revamped to meet changing tastes and styles. Our company must keep its website design and content fresh and exciting to attract new visitors and to keep them coming back for more. We must launch promotional campaigns to drive traffic to our website, products, and services; to maintain and enhance its brand identity; and to garner a greater share of a market where switching costs are low or nonexistent.

As stated before we live in a fast pace world. The strategies we put into place have to work. We have seen many changes over the past few years and we'll see more in transformations as on-demand websites become more prevalent all over the world. In the new on-demand world, competition will be more intense and