Starting a business online
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Assignment 1: Starting a Business Online, Part 1
Due Week 4 and worth 200 points
Imagine that you own a small, local clothing store along the Jersey Shore boardwalk and decide that you want to engage in e-Commerce.
Write a 4-5 page paper on the following:
1. Identify the advantages and disadvantages of taking your small business online by performing a SWOT analysis. Include 2-4 items in each category.
2. Because the Internet connects computers all over the world, any business that engages in e-Commerce instantly becomes an international business. The key issues that any company faces when it conducts international commerce include trust, culture, language, government, and infrastructure. Explain how you would address each of these issues.
3. Businesses that operate on the Web must comply with the same laws and regulations that govern the operations of all businesses, but they face 2 additional complicating factors as they try to comply with the law. First, the Web extends a company’s reach beyond traditional boundaries. Second, the Web increases the speed and efficiency of business communications. Explain how you would overcome these complicating factors that come with e-Commerce in order to comply with the law.
4. Law enforcement agencies have difficulty combating many types of online crime. Describe 2 online crimes prevalent in e-Commerce and what you would do to prevent these crimes.
Your assignment must:
• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.
The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:
• Identify the basic elements of the technology infrastructure used to conduct electronic business.
• Explain the basic communications and network concepts used in electronic commerce and the basic functioning of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
• Describe the critical legal and ethical issues related to electronic commerce.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in fundamentals of e-business.
• Write clearly and concisely about fundamentals of e-business using proper writing mechanics.
SAMPLE ANSWER
Starting a business online
In this current age of technology, the internet has become a fundamental tool in advertising and marketing business. Every business, small or large ones, benefit in the same way from the internet through e-commerce. E-commerce is defined as the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web to conduct some business activities (Barnes et al., 2013). The definition of e-commerce may differ according to the nature of the enterprise.
The Internet is an interconnection of computer networks. It is one of the core virtual infrastructures on which the framework of E-commerce is built on. The other infrastructure is the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web; conventionally known as WWW, is a model on which the Internet is built on. The World Wide Web primary function is to provide access to resources over the internet (Cavusgil et al., 2013).
Small business, like a local retail clothing store, are the ideal businesses that need the aid of e-commerce to scale up its business activities. In essence, a local clothing store stands to gain an advantage over its competitors of the same nature when it embraces the idea of e-commerce. Although, e-business models vary according to the nature of the business. The type model of e-commerce that the local online store will use is between the business and consumer.
The local store will have an online retail store. This online retail store will be in the form of a website. The website must be well structured, the search engine that is optimized and appropriately customized to fit the size of the business it holds. For optimum utilization of the resources and usefulness provided by the Internet, the information found on the website should be reliable, relevant and simple. A small online retail store site does not need to have a website that depicts information that is of no essence in the business being conducted at the shop. It should be kept strictly business oriented.
SWOT Analysis.
The main advantages of adopting an e-commerce method of conducting business are quite many. The local store will join the global business markets. The company will expand and enter international markets. The wider the market, the larger the customer base. Other than that, it is easier to handle small businesses in an e-commerce model. The size of the company dictates the number of transactions that the person running the company will have to manage. This little number of operations owing to the size of the enterprise takes fewer resources to handle electronic transactions over the e-commerce platform (Turban et al., 2015).
The local clothing store can easily offer customer service. Seeing that the number of products provided by a small business is small. Then it is easier to attend to the needs of their clients.
The cost of marketing was so high for small business. But, the advent of the internet saw a solution to this problem. It is now easier to market a little business using the internet, thus saving the company a significant amount of money that would have been utilized in the traditional marketing.
Another reward for small businesses adopting the e-commerce model is reduced cost of outsourcing. Smaller business can use technology to their advantage by contracting another company to perform services for them. This will ensure that small businesses keep up with larger companies, but at a cheaper cost than their counterparts (Barnes et al., 2013).
The fact that a local clothing store is categorized as a small business, the influence of shareholders in companies is withdrawn. The owner of the local clothing store, therefore, does not need to worry about the opinions of shareholders when making crucial business decisions because the shareholders are absent.
The e-commerce platform in the form of a website makes it easy for interested parties to view business information. Moreover, a website for a small business is easy to maintain since updates can be done easily as opposed to large websites designed for larger businesses.
Focusing on the website for the local clothing store, it is quite affordable to get a well-designed site. After the site is created, all that is needed is a domain name and a host. A domain name can be obtained while the website can be hosted by one of the many available and reliable web hosting companies that charge web-hosting annually at an affordable price. Therefore, the cost of e-commerce is quite low compared to the significant returns that this platform is going to yield. Therefore, it makes investing in an online clothing store quite affordable for a small business (Huang et al., 2013).
The Internet also provides a way for the company to gauge their productivity. This is possible through the statistics that one can get from having a website. The amount of traffic on the web will show the number of people visiting the site. Thus, you can gauge the size of the market the business is operating in. Also, you can tell the type of customers visiting your site. This information will be useful developing the company to reach a wider customer base and increase its diversity of clients. It also provides a chance for the company owner to learn from the client’s feedback and provide customer care in an excellent manner (Andam et al., 2014).
Everything that is positive must also have a negative side to it. Therefore, there are a few downsides to e-commerce. One of the weaknesses is the reliability of information about the business that is on the website. If that information is not updated on a regular basis then, the site will end up providing outdated information that will be unreliable to the needs of the business.
Technology also has hitches. These hitches include a power blackout that may render communication over the internet to be impossible. Therefore, the website needs to be hosted by a good web hosting company that will provide unrestricted access to the website at any time. If the web hosting company is not a good one, you will find that the website is always crashing. This may lead the website’s position on the search engine ranking to go down due to an unreliable connection.
Owing to the high number of the business on the web, it is quite an uphill task for a small business to reach the right customers or audience. This is attributed to the fact that some websites have better search engine optimization techniques than others. This puts some business at a disadvantage. Thus, there is a need to use search engine essentials to the best of your advantage. This will ensure that the percentage of the audience or traffic you receive on the web relates positively to the business (Longenecker et al., 2013).
The issue of bad publicity weighs significantly on the significance of an e-commerce platform about the sales made by the enterprise. At a particular time, you may find that a customer is not satisfied with the service or products that your company offers. This may drive the customer to air bad comments about your business as a way of expressing their frustration. The bad publicity may influence other customers. This may lead to the enterprise taking an adverse turn for the worst.
As we all know that image is a crucial thing to protect in the business industry. The Image of a business is everything. Therefore, this issue needs to be dealt with as soon as it comes up. An excellent way to do this is to provide excellent customer care and use feedback from the client to improve the quality of the products and services that a business offers.
The internet has a lot of potential regarding business matters. The internet has made the world be a global village. This means that communication has become faster and cheaper. Considering that communication is a vital organ for running a small business that has a high potential for expansion. More communication will enable the company to reach even the furthest customers in the world. This shows that there are opportunities for business exposure and increased sales that need to be utilized by small businesses.
Security issues are very crucial to a business that is still growing. To sustain the gradual growth over an e-commerce platform, a company needs to assure customers of security. Secure financial transactions, in this case, electronic transactions are a god way to win over the customer’s trust. Cyber theft and other criminal activities that happen over the internet lead to significant losses to business owner. Therefore, this threat needs to be dealt with following the laws that govern cyber activities.
In conclusion, the internet is a very useful tool. It can be used for some activities. The activities may be helpful to small businesses that join the e-commerce platform recently. It will be a big boost to the customer base and sales made by the enterprise. It is quite clear that the advantages of starting a small business online outweigh the disadvantages. The high potential for advertising, business exposure, and increased sales is good enough for a small business to grow with time.
References
Andam, Z. R. (2014). e-Commerce and e-Business.
Barnes, S., & Hunt, B. (Eds.). (2013). E-commerce and v-business. Routledge.
Cavusgil, S. T., Knight, G., Riesenberger, J. R., Rammal, H. G., & Rose, E. L. (2014). International business. Pearson Australia.
Huang, Z., & Benyoucef, M. (2013). From e-commerce to social commerce: A close look at design features. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 12(4), 246-259.
Longenecker, J., Petty, J., Palich, L., & Hoy, F. (2013). Small business management. Cengage Learning.
Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J. K., Liang, T. P., & Turban, D. C. (2015). Electronic commerce: A managerial and social networks perspective. Springer.
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