P6

Planning an e-commerce Strategy

Hosting:

Hosting or web service hosting is a type of internet hosting. Internet hosting allows any individuals or business to have a website on the world wide web. Companies that host on the web own servers, space from which is leased out to smaller companies who would like a website. These hosting companies also rent out physical space to other companies who want to be part of a data centre and have internet connectivity.

Promotion:

It's not good having a great e-commerce system that no one knows about, so promotion is essential. Methods of promotion include: Spiders, Pop-ups, Banners, Direct Marketing, Site Names and Forums. Spiders are used by search engines in order to locate websites, sorted by the relevancy to the keywords that have been searched by the user. Meta tags work in harmony with spiders by providing information about a website, such as how often it is updated, what the page entails and which keywords represent that page. Pop-ups are windows that appear after clicking on a link, normally very irritating for the user but can be effective if the users don't ignore them straight away and close the window. Banners are similar to pop-ups in that they appear as an image on your screen, but these are more passive and are positioned on the outskirts of a page. Forums are usually linked to a question asked by a user looking for an answer from another user about a certain subject, and a business can answer these questions, if relevant, linking the answer to their page. Direct Marketing is a technique used to boost sales where advertisers approach potential new customers directly via brochures, catalogues, leaflets, telephone sales and coupons. This is more time efficient as the marketing is only targeted at potential customers, if the wrong customers are targeted it can result in bad press. Site names need to be relevant to what the site entails, unless strong brand image is obtained for example, Amazon.co.uk does not give any clue to what the site is used for but everyone knows what it does because of the brand image. Sites like gooutdoors.co.uk have a more straight forward title in order to draw potential customers in.

User Interface and Customer Loyalty:

Vital when making an e-commerce system, the user interface needs to be simple and easy to use, yet attractive and entice potential customers. This can be achieved by using a simple interface, as people will be more inclined to use it if they know it won't take long or be hard to operate. On the contrary, if the interface is hard to use, you risk losing customers who aren't as computer savvy as others, and would feel alienated. Some customers may not be trusting of e-commerce systems because they are giving away details to an unknown entity. This can be avoided by enabling payment through PayPal, or allowing banks to check the websites legitimacy, an example of this would be Lloyds' Click Safe, which checks for the customer before money leaves their account.

If I were to start an e-commerce business I would make sure to shop around for the cheapest most reliable hosting service to ensure my website says up on the internet for a long time with out any downtime for a good price. I would only choose certain methods of promotion though as I feel that some can put potential customers off and be very obnoxious. I would not have pop-ups or certain aspects of direct marketing such as the telemarketing and emailing the customers. I would also invest money saved from the cheap hosting service in to coming at the top of the page when searched on a search engine. My interface would be totally simple and easy to use because I do not want to slim my customer base by making the payment process too complex. I would allow PayPal to be my payment method because customers can trust them, and would allow services like ClickSafe to operate on my site as I want customers to feel safe.