Ecommerce Marketing Plan
Concept of Service
The current work deals with marketing offer of e-commerce service. It highlights the essential steps of marketing of a brand-new firm offering services of website construction, design, programming, development, and promotion. The service should be provided exclusively online via the site of the company. Online business operations include ordering, agreement on requirements, elaboration of design, and providing constant customer support.
The service implementation process should include the following stages:
- Defining goals of the site. This may include either physical meeting or discussion of the product in question via Internet.
- Developing the website structure. This stage is aimed at flashing out technical aspects of the site. It should include definition of necessary technology, type and specifications of site navigation.
- Website design and built. Developing layout and graphics of the site. This may include elaborating the company's genuine creative approach in developing the graphic looks of the order, or complying with the requirements presented by the customer as to general look of the project.
- Website programming and built. This stage depends on details of each specific project and definite requirements posed as to the quality and level of the site. Also, this process varies according to the kind of customer and destination of the site contemplated. All features of the site are subject to examination and test by both company's specialist and customer.
- Technical release of the site. Once technical aspects of the project finished, the customer should be provided with free consultation along with further site marketing and promotion services, techniques, and practical advice.
- Ongoing site maintenance. This is the stage when the job of creating the customer's site is finished. But the company guarantees keeping all its sites current in terms of graphics, technology, navigation and usability. After release of the site, the company continues working with the customer as to establishing a schedule for the website regular review and maintenance to meet clients' requests, accommodate users' feedbacks, incorporating new system updates and new technologies.
It is a fact that the idea of the internet-commerce of this type is not brand-new, and for a new company to enter the market and receive profit out of its business, it is necessary to invent some novel elements in the service offered. The innovative elements that this project contains compared to large variety of competitors functioning on IT e-commerce market are based on combination of cost leadership and differentiation generic strategies (according to M. Porter, [1]). Therefore, the project is launched in B2C format, though there can be differentiation of customers and hence differentiation of the level and variety of services offered to each individual customer, and the project is for-profit, small business case.
This new business is intended to compete with both large business providers of site development services and small business representatives dealing with this issue.
Another unique feature of the project is wide variety of services included in one business offer. This includes: web-design, redesign of existing site, possibility of working with many programming languages, site management, allocation in search engines, animation, free hosting offer, email registration, web mail and POP3 access, ftp access, tools for web statistics, domain name registration, other services like full life website consulting, flash animation creation, elaboration of graphic and logo design, e-commerce and shopping carts, site management, administering and maintenance, banner ads, marketing, engine position enhancing and promotions, search engine optimization, software testing and even online training.
Industry Overview
The industry of e-commerce is one of the fastest and most dynamically developing industries worldwide. Today it is quite difficult to accurately define the impact of the Internet on commerce in exact figures, but according to the estimates by 2000 there were about 260 million Internet users worldwide and by mid 2003 their number has grown more than twice and reached 580 millions. By 2005, their number is estimated to reach more than 770 million.
These figures show that the Internet has become very important and significant business medium through which buyers and sellers not only conduct transactions that were earlier conducted live, but carry out online-specific business buy-and-sell operations. Only three years ago, in the first three quarters of 2002, according to the figures of Department of Commerce [3], e-commerce transactions amounted to more than 20 billion dollars. It should be taken into account that those numbers are significantly lower than the amount of actual real transactions.
Today, e-commerce is booming. Market size of e-commerce has reached immense volumes. Moreover, this growth tends to accelerate. While in 2002 total volume of retail American e-commerce sales was fixed at $44 billion, one year later it increased to 56 billion. Then, in 2003, online sales made only 1.6 of total sales, providing the ground to suggest that there is very large growth potential. Online sales are predicted to rise to 2.9% by the year of 2007. Thus, Internet economy force became more integral part of the entire US economy than it has ever been. Research conducted by the Cisco Systems (available at [2]) shows that the Web is transforming the way people work and the revenue from Internet transactions annually grows by more than 50 percent.
Jupiter Research [4] reports that American B2B Internet commerce rates increased noticeably over the past 5 years and amount from $336 billion in 2000 to $ 6.3 trillion in 2005. Jupiter mentions five industries that have more than half of all buying and selling operations online. These are: aerospace and defense, chemicals, electronics, motor vehicle and parts, and computer and communications equipment and software. Among these industries, computer and communications equipment and software is leading with estimated number of online sales in this 2005 year reaching to $1 trillion.
That is very important for the current study since the project in question is to be launched in computer and communications industry. Therefore, proceeding from the trends mentioned in the industry of electronic commerce, one can assume that the direction of one's business connected to online service and e-commerce, notwithstanding powerful competition, has all the chances to further develop and gain success since this market sector is subject to enhancement, development and transformation.
Since the number of Internet users is growing and the number of companies willing to be represented on the Web is increasing along with the number of companies launching online business, there is very high and further increasing demand in providing programming, design, site development and marketing services. Therefore, a new firm in the industry theoretically has solid opportunities to enter the market, whatever saturated it may be, and successfully develop. On the basis of abovementioned, the outline of relevant business target market gets clearly seen.
Target Market
The target market of the project is very vast one. It varies from individuals with the minimum requirements as to functionality, appearance and program possibilities of the site, to large companies with more solid and expensive orders. Since there are very different kinds of customers with various interests and needs, each requiring different approach and professional level of performance, they should be segmented into distinct groups. By segmenting the customers, the company increases its chances on success.
The customers were divided according to the level of the desired product complexity. After such criterion, three levels can be distinguished: those requiring basic site development; intermediate level, and sophisticated one. Basic level implies comparatively low cost of services and is fine for individual customers, non-professional companies specializing, for example, in online selling of a small range of products. According to its name, this solution anticipates limited functionality, simple design, and quick implementation of the order.
Second group of customers comprises those with intermediate level orders.