| Build
versus Buy Your E-business:
Recreate the Wheel?
Building versus buying your E-business
is a choice that ultimately combines content and commerce management
regardless of the selection. The
focus should be on customer service and retention, not increasing market
share. Developing your own
Internet commerce base involves the following steps:
·
Marketing.
Target, identify, and profile potential customers for your
promotions. Individualization
is the goal.
·
Sales.
Publishing, personalizing, and presenting information and then
assisting customers in product selection comprise the sales function.
Customers look for information rich, interactive content not a
static catalog. This content
must be created, managed, and continually recycled.
·
Processing.
Order management, fulfillment, and payment follow sales.
It should be smoothly executed and timely.
·
Service.
The expectation is for self-service.
Customer support is 24-7. In
the background, reporting and analysis tools give your organization
business intelligence about how well it is performing.
E-business Do’s and Don’ts
Experienced companies identify the
following E-business characteristics as the most important things to
execute correctly:
·
Customer service
·
Marketing and promotion
·
Personalization
·
High speed access
·
Online adoption
Those E-business characteristics
that most frustrate customers are:
·
Difficult navigation
·
Slow downloads
·
Inability to find the information
·
Numerous clicks to get to what is
wanted
·
Confusing homepage
·
Boring content
·
Lack of interactivity
·
Requirement for plug-ins
There are several factors to consider
when building or buying your E-business.
In either case, cost is a big consideration and needs to be
monitored closely – not only as an expenditure but as an element of the
bottom line. Estimates
identify labor as 79% of the cost for web site development with the
remaining split between hardware (11%) and software (10%).
Pro’s and Con’s for Building or Buying Your
E-business
The advantages of building your own web
site are (1) the satisfaction of having done the work yourself and (2)
getting exactly what you wanted. The
disadvantages are (1) material and labor costs greater than purchasing the
web site’s development, (2) lack of experience that means learning for
the first time and by mistakes, (3) IT expertise required for development
and its scarcity, and (4) responsibility for problems, troubleshooting,
and maintenance.
Web site development can be expedited
by using packaged applications/software.
This circumvents starting E-business from pure scratch. The advantages of this are (1) reliable performance from a
tried-and-true software product, (2) the ease of ordering what you want,
(3) elimination of preparation, (4) certainty of outcome, and (5) no messy
cleanup of what does not work. The
disadvantages are (1) the need for customization of the packaged
application, and (2) the final cost of the packaged application solution
despite the time and money savings.
Investing in a software solution for
E-business may be less painful than doing the work in-house. It is a manpower solution because does not take your IT
expertise away from other duties and function they may have. Upgrades from the software vendors can help your company keep
abreast of business improvements. However,
applications need to be flexible enough to adapt to your company’s
changing requirements.
Packaged applications can launch
E-business for you. The
current trend is to go with them. E-business
application development may not be your core business.
Time-to-market is faster with packaged software.
As a small business, it makes sense to buy the software and
establish a relationship with the software vender and a systems
integrator. A mid-size
company would benefit from the built-in flexibility and innovation of
E-business software and upgrades based on open and standard based systems.
A large enterprise could concentrate on a fully personalized
customer experience as content and commerce specific rather than diverting
scarce energy into developing E-business application software.
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