E-COMMERECE

E-Commerce

Executive Summary

This assignment is about online marketing opportunities available to the company in order to promote its retail sales to different geographical locations as part of strategy to diversify into new markets while continuing conventional sale of retail products in existing markets. The purpose of this report is to identify the impact of conducting online marketing campaign on the company, the core competences needed by the needed to successfully launch such campaign, the advantages and disadvantages of taking such a strategic move. This report is meant to forecast potential benefits and drawbacks of taking a move to launch company's products on the internet via exploiting online marketing available in present dynamic e-commerce environment where almost every business is trying to remain conspicuous on the international horizon via choosing to market and sell via internet.

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Research findings3

Finding 1: Financial aspects of exploiting online marketing opportunities for retail sales3

Finding 2: Operational aspects of exploiting online marketing opportunities for retail sales5

Finding 3: Additional core competences required for conducting successful online marketing campaign7

Recommendations9

Conclusion9

E-Commerce

Introduction

The online marketing and sales opportunities which is commonly referred to as ecommerce, has tremendous potential to provide growth to any business. A business needs to assess its present critical success factors that are those core competences vital for achieving success in industry. In order to exploit online marketing opportunities for retail sales, a business needs to have additional competences that are necessary for operating business via World Wide Web or simply internet (Dave, 2008). This assignment has been produced after assessing present strategic position of the company and conducting a survey of online marketing opportunities available for retail sales. Recommendations have been drafted as a result of research findings while highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the recommended options of marketing online.

Research findings

This section of the report presents summary of the research conducted for this assignment by broadly categorizing the research work into three main findings.

Finding 1: Financial aspects of exploiting online marketing opportunities for retail sales

The company is presently selling its products through retail stores in the United States. It is interesting to note that only 4% of total international retail sales are made in the United States. This highlights significance of tapping retail sales market outside United States and its potential prospects (Brynjolfsson & Smith, 2000, Pp. 563-585). After the recession of 2007/08 a large number of employed individuals lost their jobs due to downsizing. This can inferred from observing the unemployment level in United States which was 8.5 % in December 2011. In the last quarter of 2011 it remained mostly above 9%. This scenario leaves very less disposable income with consumers that de-motivate them from spending. As a result they are interested in preferring essential products like edibles and related fast manufacturing consumer goods; they all fall in the retail sales sector. Physical retail stores have large expenditure to incur due to staff, building, utility bills, taxes, etc. Therefore they charge a margin above cost that compensates for the costs they incur besides product's manufacturing price (Keillor, ...