Over the past decade there have been many notable e-business successes and failures. Discuss some of these cases and explain what lesson can be learned from them.
Looking back the past decade, technology has risen up dramatically. It definitely would not been noticed that easy, if you did not read through the statistics. According to the Moore’s Law which claims that on the technology information would double every two years and updated in 2010 only double every three years. This trend shows us how fast is technology informing growing and this why more and more people started learning and accessing this new region. “The number of internet devises has almost reached 2,000 in 1985, in 1992 it raised up to one million and in 2008 it reached one billion.”(Internet/E-commerce Statistic Witiger.com, 2010) This claims that how fast is internet growing and this is why people would start doing e-business or may be expand their business to this new area. All of these statistics literally says nowadays running a business you have to make some difference instead of just following the traditional strategy and format. This brought out a consequence of a massive numbers of e-business entering the market. The growth of internet commerce is strongly assisted by the connection of internet and online commerce of Business-to- Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). This new market had started evolving from a boring text website to a website that has more interaction with customers and more services are being provided. This enhanced internet to a successful platform for businesses and customers doing their commerce. Another factor that makes this platform good and success is, while starting up a new business in internet, you don’t need an office and as much as workers an actual store needs. It efficiently reduces the cost to a very low level.
As there are many benefits to start up a business on internet, e-business is growing rapidly. In this competitive market, there are many businesses failed to survive and of course there are some running very well. Now I’m going to discuss a few examples of e-business failures and successes.
E-business example 1:
First, I am going to talk about an e-toy Company. E-toys is a great idea for some busy parents to have chance to comfortably buy toys at home instead of taking a long time to walk into the store to buy toys. However, selling toys on internet you can experience some difficulties. The e-toy company that I am talking about is eToys. They gave us a great lesson on the importance of supply chain in terms of e-business. They have a serious problem on supply chain. The traditional progress after the order has been made from customers, and then passes it to inventory system, warehouse, may be distributor and Delivery Company. “eToys company claimed that they had the easiest using and the most convince website. After that, it attracted a lot of customers to go and search, and it ended up with a decent numbers of orders. In1999 Christmas, eToys faced a serious problem. They made a decision to reduce the money spent on packing and shipping to their delivery company. The consequence of it is, they failed to deliver 4% of products on time and it lost the reputation to public. During the same time its competitor Toys R Us experienced the similar thing. They had a supply chain problem and ended up failed to deliver the products on time. After this, Toys R Us knew they had to change strategy to solve this problem. They found Amazon.com as their partner, because they thought they are good at selling toys and Amazon.com is good at delivering which will make them be a good partner. As Toys R Us had found a partner, eToys decided to change their strategy as well. They did not find anyone to be their partner, and decided to build a distribution centre. eToys directly shipped products from the distribution centre to its customers.”(Toys R Us and eToys, Choate.info, 2006) This decision made the delivery