Business Skills For E-Commerce

Business Plan

Discuss about the Business Skills for E-Commerce.

The business start up in Czech Republic requires a thorough investigation of the location as well as the market condition of the particular country. The IT product that has been selected for starting up the online business is Home intelligence system. Home Intelligence system is a type of Artificial intelligence system that is very much necessary for a country like Czech Republic. It provides a complete security to the people in that country.

There should not be any compromise when it comes to provide security to the home. The starting up of business in this field is not easy as it could face many challenges and the technology is new to the country. The starting up o business requires a good business plan, the findings of potential customer is important. The company needs a good business model and the hierarchical structure should be well defined. As the business is dependent on e-commerce system therefore, the implementation of e-commerce should be done in an appropriate way.

The online business requires a business plan in an informal way. The business plan is in form of a written document that helps in identifying the goals of a company. The business plan gives an outline about what the company intends and what are the goals of the company. The company also needs to prepare a financial plan for achieving the goals. The business plan includes strategic elements and operational elements (Kiznyte, Welker and Dechange 2016). The business plan made for opening online stores in Czech Republic contains the following structure:

Description of the company- The description of the company should be given in About Us section. It focuses on which products the company is specialized. The startup company in Czech Republic mainly focuses on the Home Intelligence system. Home Intelligence is a broad section of application (Lee 2013). The company focuses selling the product like Door and window sensor, Wave thermostat and indoor security camera. The door and window sensor requires monitor activities with the specified sensor. The sensor is synchronized with the mail id as well as the mobile number. The opening of door and window will forward a message of the activities to the given contact details. The sensor could be used to trigger the recording of the video. The status of the sensor could be achieved in the smart phone or laptop (Fielder and Gdyk 2016). Wave thermostat is a black and white device and has the feature of touch screen.  It gives one cooling stage and two heating stage. It is been controlled remotely and helps in monitoring the temperature of the home (Rohini and Venkatasubramanium 2015). The energy consumption is been reduced by installing it through smart phone devices. The indoor security camera helps in monitoring and record the activities that is been going inside the home. The camera has HD resolution and helps in capturing the video at nighttime (Farhad, Hossain and Ahmad 2013). The company is going to focus on the above products at the initial stage.

Target Customer

Analysis of Business Environment: The above three products are chosen for Czech Republic. The market survey shows that the country lacks in security. Therefore, a company should be set up in that country where security could be given to the citizen based on the IT product. Market Analysis: The market analysis shows that the IT security products would be a good scope for the business, as it is needed for the people. The country has limited shops in the sector of IT security products for Home Intelligence system. Therefore opening an online store them will give a good scope for the business to grow in Czech Republic.

Competitive Analysis: Before starting up the company a competitive analysis is needed to be done that would give a vivid idea on the other rival company those have the potential to give a tough competition (Fleischer and Bensossaun 2015).

Objectives: The objectives for the company should include the report of break-even at the end of the year, capture the urban market up to 30%  which would be a great achievement for a startup company. The company should rule the market as the pioneer company. Customer satisfaction should be the first priority given by the company.

Operational Plan: The Company being a online company should give a high thought on dispatching the product to the customer in the appropriate condition. The operational plan segmenting the suppliers and should have a good hold on supply chain management and should have technical expertise who could install the devices (Mcdonald 2016). This would be an innovative idea provide by the startup company but it requires more capitalization. The operational plan also includes the product that are been imported should be received by a responsible agent and the product shifting would be done in the ware house from where it would be delivered to the customer.

The most important features are to target the customers to whom the products could be delivered. The customers are the essential part to make a company success. The first step for starting a start up is targeting the valuable customers. Once the targeted customer is identified, it became easy for the start up business to gain success. The targeted customer for the home intelligence system could be the consumer market who needs the household appliances and installation of automated systems. The business markets could be targeted like the retail sector, corporate offices, hotels and the warehouses. The company would provide the above products and the specific benefits of the products are stated. The products like door and window sensor and indoor security camera provides a high level of security to the citizen. Moreover, the climatic condition of the country is cold. Therefore, introducing a device like Wave Thermostat will be very helpful for the citizens of the country as it have two stages of heating and could have the control of the temperature inside the home. The device Indoor security camera is also important to provide the necessary security to the people of the country.

Business Model and Organisational Structure

Ostelwalder ontology should be followed for building a good business model. The business model is based on four pillars:

• Offer: It contains element like value proposition, value level and price level

Value proposition: It contributes the reason that describes the needs of offering. The three values contribute for value proposition are use, effort and risk.

Value level: it evaluates the utility of a certain product for customers and is used for comparing the offers against the rivals.

Price Level: It helps in comparing the price of the offers with the other rivals who are engaged in the same sector of the business (Leih, Linden and Turkman 2014). The levels are categorized into market, free, economic and high end.

• Customer Interface: Customer interface could be classified into three fundamentals:

Customer Relationship: This helps in evaluating the good relationship made with the customers helped in getting new customers (Dasilve and Trkman 2014). It also helps in retaining the old customers and gives them extra feature for being an elite customer.

Function: It helps in describing the relationship of the company with the valued customers. It is categorized into personalization, brand and trust. This states that the relationship personalization increases the trust of the customer on the products, which help in creating a brand.

Customer Buying: It is categorized into four sectors. Awareness, Evaluation, after sales and purchase are the four sectors on which customer buying circle depends.

• Infrastructure Management: It includes core capability, partner network and value configuration. The capabilities are needed for providing the value proposition. It could be categorized into tangible that differentiate between the resources like property and equipments. Intangible helps in differentiating between brands and copyrights. The human part helps in computing the human skills and knowledge (Kabir, Sadiq and Tesfamariam 2014). The partnership network helps in describing the motivation of the company for concluding the agreement of the partner. The value configuration helps to describe the way value is incorporated within a company. The three type are value chain, value network and value shop. The elements points the value satisfies in solving the problem of the customers and linking them.
• Finance Aspects: The finance aspects includes revenue model and cost structure. Pricing method includes three categories: Fixed pricing, market pricing and differential pricing.

• Ubiquity:- The ubiquitous nature of E-Commerce makes the market to extend behind the operational hours. The online stores are always opened and it helps to lower the cost of transaction of the customer.
• Global Reach:- This particular features of E-Commerce helps the lcal market to get a extension in the form of global market. With the help of internet and browsers the customers can get the access of the products and its price. The customers can als purchase the specified products by e-transaction which doesn’t have any national or international barriers.
• The world follows only one standard, which is known as Universal standard. This standard helps individuals, company, and government to abide by only one standard. So it helps the interactions to be specific. It plays a great role in setting the cost at the market entry level (Huang and Benyoceuf 2013). Therefore, considering a online based store with a real market store the resultant can be seen that the universal standards benefited the traditional business to have a good customer service.
• Information Richness:- If the concerned company is going for an E-Commerce marketing then the branding and advertisement should be given priority.E-Commerce which mainly contains the video and the image of the products should be rich in information as it helps the customer to get vivid idea about the product.
• Interactivity:- The best important thing of E-Commerce is that customers can interrogate the company directly. In traditional way there is a single way communication through the medium like newspapers, magazine. But E-Commerce sited the double way communication which helps the customer in buying the specified product.
• Information Density:- Through E-Commerce the amount of information and the quality of the information provided by them is of high level. Therefore, it reduces the cost of the information and increases the quality of the information. The information provided are accurate, less costing and in a large volume.
• Personalization and Customization:- The messages received by the groups and the individuals are been personalized and customized by the E-Commerce technology. The customers can save their product in their shop cart and can used them according to their future need.
• User Generator Content:- E-Commerce has the facility  for their members as well as for the general public  to share their content on a worldwide basis. Therefore, the consumers who have their accounts can promote the product or service by sharing personal or commercial information.

There are four types of E-Commerce system that are mainly used:

• Business to Business (B2B): It includes all transactions of respected to goods and services taking place between companies (Qu et al. 2015). The traditional whole sellers and the producers use this type of e-commerce.
• Business to Commerce (B2C): It is used by the malls, retails sector and digital publications. This process is easier as well as dynamic. The consumer has informative content from the website of the company and they has the option to choose their product and order them directly.
• Consumer to Consumer (C2C): It includes the transactions between the customers and is very common in the project based on the crowd sourcing. These transactions are been conducted with the help of third party. The third party plays the role of providing the platform upon which the transactions take place.
• Consumer to Business (C2B): This process is completely reverse to the process of exchanging goods by traditional ways. A huge mass of individuals get their services available for the companies to purchase.

The recommended model to be used for the startup company for the online distribution of good is business to business and business to consumer model. B2B is used for the target customer like the corporate offices and industries. B2C is used for the targeted customers like consumer market. B2C is used as the customer could have a direct communication with the business. The customer could view the catalogue of the product and ordered the product in the website. Therefore, this type of e-commerce system is very much helpful for the customers as well as for the business provider.

The important considerations of cost that should be taken into account are:

• Designing of the website and development of the website: The completion for this task depends on the work of a developer. Therefore, the company needs to hire an developer for customization of visual layout as well as the design. The payment of the gateway is integrated in the website. It collaborate the order management with the CRM systems (Hua, Morosan and DeFranco 2015). Setting and managing the hosting website is too expensive and depends on the charge of the developer. The estimated cost of designing the website is €33000.
• The feature of adding the plugin of a free e-commerce website incorporates more cost on updating and maintains the site. The estimated cost for Plug-in is €150.
• The security features has to be included in the site. The cost of SSL certificate varies depending on the grade of security needed and the total number of domain to be covered (Gruschow, Kemper and Brettel 2015). The estimated cost of SSL certificate is €200 per year.
• The selection of appropriate hosting plan for the site of E-commerce is important. It shows that the hosted e-commerce site has the ability of dealing with a customer. The estimated cost for hosting the website is €30 per year.
• The maintenance cost is needed due to update the website and to renew the security of the website. The estimated cost for the maintenance and development is €4800.

The total estimated cost for B2C service is €38180.

Conclusion

The market for the home intelligence system has potential to give success to the business. The consumers understand the requirements of a home intelligence system for the security of their home and the monitoring of the house could be done with the help of a smart device. The future market of the home intelligence system is not that clear as the advance in technology could bring new changes in the market and the home intelligence system could be back dated. Therefore, starting a business on the home intelligence system might have some risks in it.

Reference List

DaSilva, C.M. and Trkman, P., 2014. Business model: What it is and what it is not. Long Range Planning, 47(6), pp.379-389.

Farhad, M.M., Hossain, S.N. and Ahmad, M., 2013, May. Indoor security system design and implementation using depth information. In Informatics, Electronics & Vision (ICIEV), 2013 International Conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

Fiedler, M. and Gdyk, L., Fibar Group SA, 2016. Door/window sensor. U.S. Patent D747,228.

Fleisher, C.S. and Bensoussan, B.E., 2015. Business and competitive analysis: effective application of new and classic methods. FT Press.

Grüschow, R.M., Kemper, J. and Brettel, M., 2015. Do Transaction Costs of Payment Systems Differ Across Customers in E-commerce?.

Hua, N., Morosan, C. and DeFranco, A., 2015. The other side of technology adoption: Examining the relationships between e-commerce expenses and hotel performance. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 45, pp.109-120.

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Kiznyte, J., Welker, M. and Dechange, A., 2016. Applying Project Management Methods to the Creation of a Start-up Business Plan: The Case of Blendlee.

Lee, W.S., 2013. Home intelligence system and method. U.S. Patent Application 13/956,364.

Leih, S., Linden, G. and Teece, D., 2014. Business model innovation and organizational design: a dynamic capabilities perspective.

McDONALD, M.A.L.C.O.L.M., 2016. 5 Strategic marketing planning. The marketing book, p.86.

Qu, W.G., Pinsonneault, A., Tomiuk, D., Wang, S. and Liu, Y., 2015. The impacts of social trust on open and closed B2B e-commerce: A Europe-based study. Information & Management, 52(2), pp.151-159.

Rohini, S. and Venkatasubramanian, K., 2015. Z-Wave based Zoning Sensor for Smart Thermostats. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 8(20).