Investigate Market Potential For An E Commerce Information Technology Essay

Investigate Market Potential For An E Commerce Information Technology Essay I have decided to analyse the potential of B2C e-commerce business, operating in United Kingdom, France and Germany, selling the equestrian equipments. According to European Horse Network statistics the horse industry is a growing by 5% a year, generating about 100 billion euros a year of economic impact. (European Horse Network, 2010) In the UK alone there is 3.5 million people who have ridden a horse at least once per a year, giving insight in to a size of the possible market. (bhs.org.uk, 2012) Leisure riding is in general more popular than a lecture riding; Great Britain has a 600 riding schools, but an average price is one of the highest from all european countries. On the other markets in Germany and France, the prices are on average 3 times lower and they have a much larger number of a riding schools about 7000 and 4000 respectively.(Liljenstolpe, 2009) These Factors and the high popularity of horse riding sports in selected countries creating demand for equestrian equipments, clothes and accessories. About 70% of riders are women and according to (Barletta, 2003) women control over 80% of a household spendings. Based on these data we can assume that most of the potential customers will be women and so the marketing and the selection of the goods needs to be modified for this purpose. The assortment needs to be of a wide range from childrens clothing to the accessories which doesnt have to be necessary to carry out an activity, but to fulfil a fashion function as well. For every business its important to estimate the length of a period in which the customers are going to return to the shop. (Stricker, 2008) A quarter of the UK equestrian market is represented by people under 16, this imply that the clothes has to be purchased for them more often, due to their constant physical development. Its estimated that about 8% of horse users in the UK are disabled, hippo-therapy is a main way of their interaction with the horses and to address this niche market, its necessary to provide therapeutic riding equipments in our store. (RDA, 2012) Kamil Bublis Student No.: 122012 Assignment 3 page 2 This e-commerce is aiming to provide the services in three countries and for this purpose it is necessary to have a quality distribution channel and this can be outsourced to a supplier using drop shipping, which is a form of shipping directly from the suppliers to the clients. In order to compete abroad there may be a need to accommodate a local suppliers of that particular country to keep the costs of final product competitive. Threat to the business is also a strong competitors base on a well established market, where it will be hard to compete with an aggressive price politics for a newly established business, therefore it will be better to focus on providing better services and flexible delivery times, which could be a key to gain a part of the market share. (COM, 2012) 3.2 evaluate current e-Commerce systems in use by organizations. Businesses have a wide variety of e-commerce solutions to chose from, but based on previous analysis, only few of them are suitable for the chosen e-commerce. Amazon was one of the first e-commerce businesses starting in 1995 by Jeff Bezos and is currently offering an Amazon Webstore platform to the public, to host there their e-commerce businesses. (Amazon, 2012) Advantages for a business using amazon services are international presence in countries where Amazon is carrying out their business, large potential customers base, payment gateway and already built network and delivery infrastructure. For starting business selling goods, drop shipping is one of the least expensive way how to start e-commerce. (Stephenson and Rich, 2008) The seller doesnt get to hold the item, reducing warehousing expenses, but rather pay the supplier to deliver the goods directly to the customers. The need to host a website on an Amazon Webstore may be seen as a disadvantage because the website is hosted on someone elses server creating amateurish look and feel of the business, rather than having an own domain and starting business will also have to consider monthly instalments and fees for the service. (à ¥Ã‚ ¸Ã†â€™Ãƒ ¥Ã‚ Ã‚ ¢Ãƒ ¥Ã¢â‚¬  Ãƒ ¦- ¯Ãƒ ¤Ã‚ ¼Ã‚ ¯Ãƒ ©Ã¢â‚¬ ¡Ã…’à ¥Ã¢â‚¬ ¡Ã‚ ºÃƒ §Ã¢â‚¬ °Ã‹â€ Ãƒ ¥Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã‚ ¬Ãƒ ¥Ã‚ Ã‚ ¸, 2003) An open source e-commerce system can represent a less expensive solution, but for a cost of need to setup and interconnect various parts of the e-commerce by the business owner. Magento is popular content management system written in PHP offering free and Kamil Bublis Student No.: 122012 Assignment 3 page 3 paid version of the software and will be used to develop the planned e-commerce, because of its flexibility and a level of control over various parts of e-business. (McCombs and Banh, 2009) Content management system is the back-end of the e-commerce website where the products can be added and updated. As I have decided to use drop shipping because of low initial cost and simplicity, the ecommhub.com will act as a middle man providing inventory management, order fulfilment and be linked to my suppliers. Next step is to set up a payment gateway provider, such as sagepay.com for its competitive prices and no transaction fees, which is necessary to carry out an e-commerce. (Jones, 2012) The advantage over amazons system is modularity which allows to modify only certain parts of system like a hosting, payment gateway provider and to give a better control over business. 3.3 discuss the financial implications of an e-Commerce solution. From financial point of view the e-commerce implications can be separated to the expenses required to commence the business and the payment systems. Three different payment systems exist such as pre-paid, instant-paid and post-paid system each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Post-paid system is the simplest solution for a seller but also poses a credit risk in a case of a fraudulent customers, because the goods are delivered prior to receiving a payment. (Groenink, 2001) Instant-paid system accomplish the payment at the time of purchase, but require security measures in form of encryption of the communication. (LBC 2012, Lesson 9 Internet Payment Methods, page 1) This will be the preferred payment system for the equestrian e-commerce, as 43 million people in the UK are using debit cards and it is the favoured way to carry out the payments. (UK Cards, 2010) There is many payment gateway systems to choose from, but I have opted for sagepay.com solution, as they provide very competitive prices for a flat-rate. The company is based in the UK which is an advantage as the e-commerce will be carried out nationally first, with a plans to expand abroad and sagepay accept multiple currencies to enable this. Kamil Bublis Student No.: 122012 Assignment 3 page 4 An advantage is also a free Paypal integration, support for major cards and free personalised payment page so the customers wont feel that they have to be redirected to a different website to pay for goods. (Sagepay, 2012) Beside this, there are other expenses directly related to an e-commerce such as cost of web hosting, intermediary services like an ecommhub to manage inventory stocking and the expenses for solicitor. An online business has to comply with a laws of the country where the business is carried out, address privacy policies, data protection and website terms and conditions (Smith, 2007), to address these requirements I have chosen Pearne CO solicitors. (Pearne Co, 2011) 3.4 design an e-Commerce solution The e-commerce I am about to design will have only a virtual presence and therefore the website will differ from its counterpart, where the business is carried out in a mortar shop and launching an online e-commerce. These websites are distinct in their purpose and design. The most suitable design is a catalog website where the customers can browse the products, read descriptions and reviews to base the purchases according to them and the purpose of e-commerce for brick shop is to sell, but also attract customers to their physical branches. (Bushry, 2005) For already established business, the domain name is the same as the business name, but it should be short or easy to remember. (LBC 2012, Lesson 7: Designing E-Commerce Solutions, page 5) The domain name for our e-commerce will be relevant to the main products, reason for this is to improve a searchability of our website in the search engines, one of the main marketing tools for an online business. The domain name registration will be provided by the web hosting service pixelinternet.co.uk for 2 years period. Using a hosting company has many advantages particularly for a small starting business, because the expenses related to the hosting of own website, staff resources and technical equipments can be high. (Lawrence and Tavakol, 2007) Disadvantage of hosting service is loss of a full control over the system and limiting software and hardware options, but the chosen hosting service provider has very flexible Kamil Bublis Student No.: 122012 Assignment 3 page 5 options to satisfy specific needs of developers. The website will be developed using Magento system, partially in-house and with a help of an outside designer to create the unique Magento template design to separate the business from competitors. The reason for this is a simplicity of Magento content management system for a back-end, managed in-house and an importance of having an outstanding visually attractive front-end for the customers. Search engine optimization is very broad discipline spanning through IT, design/usability, public relations and social media, to increase a natural traffic to the website via listing high in the search engines. (Enge, et al., 2012) The basic SEO practice is proper use of meta tags for keywords and description which in this case would be something like horse equipments, equestrian clothes and shoes. The search engines are using spiders, small programs to crawl and search the internet for new websites, but to speed up the process, it is a good practice to submit the website to the search engines manually. Marketing of an online business is a constant process during a lifetime of the e-commerce, starting with a website code, through SEO, paid forms of marketing and analysing of the website traffic to modify system to better target customers. (Remenyi and Brown, 2001) To collect and evaluate customers data from website traffic, business can use analysis software which is in case of a selected hosting provider included in a price. The collected data can be used in the blogs and social marketing to better understand customers needs. Testing of the website is an important part of the development prior to deploying, as any imperfections, technical or grammatical, are perceived by potential buyers as a drawback. It is necessary to test a payment gateway and try to buy and get delivered the products to catch any bugs or glitches in the system. Direct approach to get a customers opinion is a survey which can be conducted online and according to studies, the quality of the web based survey is higher than other approaches. (Spitz, Niles and Adler, 2007) 3.5 evaluate the suitability of an e-Commerce solution. The suitability of the e-commerce solution can be evaluated against many criterias and scalability is amongst them. It is important to monitor the peak traffic of the website and the performance of the servers and network infrastructure to avoid the bottlenecks. The web Kamil Bublis Student No.: 122012 Assignment 3 page 6 hosting provider provide an unlimited network bandwidth, which create room for more traffic in the future. Another important factor is a flexibility of product catalog in the e-commerce to accommodate to a future changes of the product range. It is down to a database design for a content management system, to be able to address future items and incorporate them easily to an e-commerce. (Oracle Corporation, 2011) Modularity of proposed e-commerce system, instead of single platform, create a higher requirements to manage different parts of the e-commerce from supplier chain, payment gateway to CMS, but also enable to change particular element to save costs or to provide more powerful services. Website metrics can be used to measure an e-commerce performance, usability and security, but as the evaluated e-commerce doesnt provide us with the performance or usability data, I will focus on a security of an e-commerce. (Abd El-Aleem, et al., 2007) The web hosting provider is offering an advanced SSL security certificates for data encryption required during transmissions of personal data and are used in conjunction with a digital certificate. Purpose of digital certificate is to prove the identity of particular server or in this case a business. (LBC 2012, Lesson 7: Designing E-Commerce Solutions, page 3) The feasibility study is an analytic tool used to estimate how a business would operate under a set of assumptions about technology, equipment and capital needs. (Katimuneetorn, 2008) The cost of technology in chosen e-commerce are expenses for web hosting, payment gateway and development of website, these costs are also a running expenditures for e-commerce, except the cost of website development. (Abdul, 2009)

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

Larry’s letter is instrumental in forcing Keller to realise his fault. Discuss (20M) All My Sons a play by Arthur Miller was staged at the coronet theatre in January 1947 and ran for 328 performances. The play was well constructed and realistic in nature, and it was extremely popular among the audiences. All My Sons started in the middle of things and spends most of the play uncovering the facts of the past so that the audience can see the last act consequences in the present.The play actually deals with the fate of Joe Keller, an uneducated self-made man who has committed an atrocious act during World War II. The play ends with the suicide of the Joe Keller who repents after being exposed with the content of his son Larry’s letter. As mentioned earlier, Joe Keller is an uneducated self-made man who has committed an atrocious act during World War II. Keller has as partner Steve Deever and their factory manufactures cylinder heads for aircrafts. During the war, they rece ive a contract from the army to supply cylinder heads on an urgent basis.However the cylinder heads had hairline cracks in them and Keller is immediately informed by Deever. But Keller asked Deever to get the cylinder heads welded and that he would take full responsibility of the damaged products. Unfortunately those damaged cylinder heads cause twenty-one planes to crash killing their pilots. However at the trial Keller denies responsibility and is exonerated, and the blame shifts to Steve Deever who is imprisoned. Following that Joe Keller lives in total impunity with his family.However when he is confronted with the content of his son Larry’s letter, he is forced to realise his fault. In fact Larry’s letter was intended to his fiancee Ann, in which he reveals that he was shamed by his father’s involvement in fraud and profiteering. Consequently he committed suicide by allowing his plane to crash. However the content of the letter was kept secret by Ann becaus e of her selfish motive to get married to Chris who is Larry’s brother. Moreover she did not want to break the harmony of the home of her would be in laws.But finally the content of the letter is revealed to Kate Keller by Ann because the former is still refusing the union of Ann and Chris. Consequently Ann uses the letter as her trump card to save her future union with Chris and the letter forces Kate to accept to accept Larry’s death and her husband’s crime of killing twenty one pilots. Moreover Chris is also made aware of the content of the letter and is unwilling to forgive his father. Consequently Joe Keller is confronted by Chris and based on the content of Larry’s letter, Joe keller is compelled to reveal the truth of the case to Chris.Joe Keller tries to justify his acts by arguing that he had worked in the interest of his family. But Chris being an idealist condemns the act of his father. Finally Joe Keller realises his fault and understands the disastrous implications of his actions. In order to escape from guilt and repay for his crime, he commits suicide. To conclude, it can be said that the Larry’s letter is indeed of prime importance in making Joe Keller realise his fault, but who unfortunately has a tragic end.

Dunkirk-Not a Triumph? Essay

Many people also believed that Dunkirk was a disaster; it was a disaster in a number of ways. Firstly, there were many casualties in the battle. 68,000 of the British Expeditionary Force perished during the barrage, along with about a quarter of the remaining French military. Along with the loss of vital live came the massive losses of equipment. Overall, nearly 40,000 pieces of equipment were surrendered to the enemy, including 17,000 machine guns, 12,000 field guns, 2,800 anti-aircraft guns and 475 tanks. This was one of the worst losses of equipment ever sustained by the British military. In this part of my essay I am going to prove how the next four sources challenge the interpretation of Dunkirk being a triumph. Firstly, to help the statement that Dunkirk was not a triumph is source B10 as it argues the fact that it was not organised there was a lot of waiting around and the horrific state of the soldiers, â€Å"while among the crowds on the beaches were shell-shocked, dazed so ldiers wandering about trying to find some shelter from the bombing.† The source was created by John Harris, a historian. This source is taken from a book about the great military battles. The purpose of this source is to sell and he wants other people to understand his point of view. This source is very reliable because it is written by a historian, therefore he will be very knowledgeable about the research and he will know what he is talking about, but the source was written in a poetic and dramatic way, so John Harris may be emphasizing the content of this source. The usefulness of this source is very good as it gives us a slight understanding of what state the soldiers were in, and what type of things they would experience whilst on the beaches of Dunkirk, â€Å"some of the men were even bomb-happy and on the edge of hysteria.† Meaning that soldiers were so tired that they were laughing; mentally falling apart and that there was no getting away from the bombs, they were constant. This source is also useful as it gives a soldiers point of view. However, the book is John’s own interpretation, meaning that it could be inaccurate. The next source that does support this statement is source B12 which disagrees that Dunkirk was a triumph as argues at it being â€Å"a military defeat†. However this source does portray across that it was â€Å"a propaganda victory†, this would be because newspapers started this myth of the battle being a victory and the government just let them carry on with it, did not question their decisions. The source was created by a BBC news reporter. The purpose of this was to give out information. This source is reliable as it is by the BBC, which a British news company that is repetitively well respected and trustworthy, the BBC are also criticising reports from starting the Dunkirk myth. However, this source is hindsight. This source would be useful as it helps prove the statement, ‘Dunkirk was not a triumph?’, because it shows that propaganda was used to manufacture of Dunkirk being a victory and almost rule out the negative side of Dunkirk. The third source that I will use that will support Dunkirk not being a triumph is B14. It tells us about a senior army officers experience during Dunkirk, already this source is reliable as Brian Horrocks was there, but he is remembering events that happened, but on the other hand you tend to always remember significant events. The purpose of this officer writing his autobiography is to make money,( to increase sales he has written it in an emotional way that will make it more interesting) celebrate his life story and use it as historical evidence. The author had first-hand experience of these events which makes it so reliable. The source tells us what a soldier would remember about the retreat to Dunkirk, â€Å"shame and exhaustion†- this would be because when the troops had returned to Britain Churchill would not allow them to go back and bring back more evacuees. Brian Horrocks gives us some idea of what the tactics were like for both sides, Nazis used Blitzkrieg and where well prepared, whereas Britain and France where making tactical errors and major flaws. The final source that I am going to use that will back up Dunkirk being a disaster is B16; Lord Haw-Haw is questioning Churchill’s tactics, Churchill being a liar and how many more lives he is willing to sacrifice. Lord Haw-Haw (British citizen, heavily influenced by the Nazis) broadcasted this on a radio hearing on the 17th June 1940. This source shows that not everyone believed in Winston Churchill’s views and therefore where willing to question him. The purpose was to undermine British confidence, so that eventually Churchill will start questioning himself, also undermined British propaganda.

The Miserable And Wretched Creatures Of Mary Shelley s...

Many authors during the early nineteenth century wrote about the horrible working conditions that existed during the Industrialization movement in early nineteenth century Europe. Some wrote directly toward this issue, like Karl Marx in the â€Å"Communist Manifesto,† but others decided voice their opinions through the characters of their literary works. The miserable and wretched creatures of Mary Shelley’s â€Å"Frankenstein† and Charles Dickens’s â€Å"A Christmas Carol† are all products of the same social and cultural forces, however one is more noticeably linked to these issues while the other is more abstract. The two child-like spirits, Ignorance and Want, serve as warnings to Scrooge that society will be littered with people ignorant and wanting†¦show more content†¦This is emphasized even more when the spirit says to â€Å"Beware [the] boy; for on his brow I see that written which Doom, unless the writing be erased.† The two children not only represent the overarching problems that come with having the bourgeoisie reign, but what will later occur if this reign continues to develop further. While the two spirits appear to be small children now, if given the chance to grow and become identical to their fathers, they will us their ignorance and want to worsen the future of society. The â€Å"Doom† written on Ignorance’s face is the doom of society if the bourgeoisie continue to control more of it. Right now the bourgeoisie might just be a small issue, but if the issue continues to grow larger in size, just like the two children, everyone will be filled with the same ignorance and wants and thus society will be just as wretched as these two spirits. Dickens warns his readers to not produce those similar to Ignorance and Want, but rather to be more charitable and giving toward those like them instead. After being rejected by Felix and the other villagers of the cottage, Victor Frankenstein’s monster states â€Å"Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.