Scope of the Project
The second part of the project focuses on the development of a prototype on-line provision. You will be asked to develop physical e-business site using specialist e-business development software and then develop e-marketing and e-customer relationship strategies by researching and identifying opportunities to promote your site via a range of electronic media and virtual customer relationship tools. Core to this is identifying further your customer base and how they engage with on-line forums, blogs and other rich media applications. You will also be asked to research and develop how your business opportunity will interact with key partners and intermediaries as well as examining the legal, security and ethical issues of best practice.
You should think of each assignment not necessarily as a linear piece of work but rather you may wish to research, develop and redevelop different sections as your knowledge base and practical experience grows as has already been stated in part 1.
You should aim to do as much personal research as possible and see the learning resource environment mainly as a stepping stone to develop a further in depth of analysis and critical understanding in the topic areas provided.
Coursework Part 2 – Planning and Implementing your E-business
In this part you will implement some of the research you engaged with in Part 1 by exploring the actual development. You will do this by examining a range of issues under the headings below. You should present your assignment for this part in the form of a report with appropriate front page, table of contents, headers and footers, references etc. You should aim to present no more than 2000 words for this component which will exclude tables, diagrams, references appendices etc. You should present statistics you have researched that will enhance your justifications in appendices to this report.
When developing your critical analysis you should refer to theory and/or journal papers to progress your argument with appropriate references, then discuss how this can be applied to your e-business opportunity. The format of your report should be as below.
Introduction
In this section you should give a short précis of what your on-line value offer is and how you think the site that you develop will drive customers to your e-business development.
Client Side Design
You will design an outline e-business site using the following free hosted application
Using this development host you should develop a prototype of your e-business site which will contain:
- Home Page – Outlining who you are and what service the site presents
- Catalogue – A range of grouped products or services
- Contacts Page Description of contact information and customer feedback
mechanisms.
- You will copy the URL you are assigned to the front page of your report so your lecturer can access your design.
Critically evaluate what cultural and personal issues you need to consider in the design, particularly if trading globally.
Optimisation
- Develop a five point plan of activities you would need to do to fully optimise your web site. Justify each point on the plan and how your site would benefit and gain advantage from these optimisation strategies you have decided upon.
- You will need to identify why a good understanding of what people are searching on is so important to the wording in your text on the site.
- Core to this discussion is the selection of a web analytics tools and how you would use it to target your customer’s on-line buying behaviour. You should discuss this in detail as one of your points on the plan.
E-marketing
- Digital brand management is important to get the value offer to the customers and as such any e-business should engage in a number of digital marketing activities to promote the offer and drive customers to the site.
- Critically analyse how you would develop a digital marketing campaign. You should select a range of media, blogs, forums, e-zines, authorware, etc which your business could contribute that would communicate with your customer base, i.e. you need to find out first what media they are using. Be specific about what media opportunities you would use include current research on Mobile Apps if relevant to promoting your site.
- Evaluate the use of a variety social media and how you could exploit this to make your brand more visible to on-line communities or prospects.
Quality of Service
- Briefly discuss how you would guarantee quality of service in your e-business; you should examine what is meant by quality gaps and how to exploit this.
Customer Relationship Management
- Critically analyse how you would develop e-CRM methods to support your site and your customer base. You should develop this in terms of promoting customer loyalty and trust. You should also look for opportunities to increase revenue generation if possible. You should clearly identify the different stages of the customer lifecycle and how your opportunity will try to maintain valued customer retention and what methods you will use.
Managing the B2B connection
- Discuss the main issues in E-procurement for your business and how using selected intermediaries can help source products for development. You should be specific with regard to how you would source the volume of products you would expect to offer. You should briefly outline any terms or contract information these intermediaries require.
Security and Legal Issues
- Examine the issues on security and the rights of the customer and add a new page to your e-business site stating what your policy is in line with new e-business legislation and payment policies.
Submitting Your Work
On completion of this research assignment make sure you email your work to your lecturer on or before the submission date. Please ensure that your student number is on the front cover and every page footer. Your document should be called “E-Business Coursework 2” and the email entitled “BA4 – E-business 2”
