Analysis and design Building an e-business
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Part 3 Implementation
Analysis for e-business
is concerned with understanding the business and user require- ments for a new system. Typical analysis activity can be broken down into: understanding
the current process and then reviewing possible alternatives for implementing the e-business solution. In the following sections we will review different techniques that enable us to sum-
marize the operation of current processes and proposed e-business processes. In this section we focus on using diagrams to demonstrate the business processes. User requirements cap-
ture techniques that help determine the function required by a system are described in the Focus on user-centred site design section.
Analysis for e-business
Analysis for e-business
Using analytical tech- niques to capture and
summarize business and user requirements.
We’re not Sainsbury’s and don’t have a shop to present our offering from, so creating awareness through Facebook is an obvious thing to do.
We get something like 15 of our traffic through Facebook. It might not be the best converting traffic but it’s important for spreading our brand. It was also easy for us to
put together – it took us a week to get the functionality going and perhaps another five days of tweaking.
Going forward, would you consider developing a multi-channel presence? We know from our competitors’ experience that offline for this product doesn’t work as
well in terms of margins. You can, of course, sell flowers offline because there are high street florists. But it
is much more profitable for us to refine our proposition rather than expand into offline. Direct marketing for offline alone is very expensive and the conversion rate is terrible.
It just doesn’t warrant it.
Have you thought about developing your e-commerce platform into a side-business? It has occurred to us. The Prestat partnership has been very successful and we know
we could do another one of those. We have built both a great technology solution and a highly efficient operational platform meaning we can offer a full blown solution to third
parties if we wish to.
The question is where is our time best spent – creating value in the Arena brand or white labelling what we’ve done to date? Or both?
What about launching other sites? There is a lot to be gained by improving our core offering – we know a lot about flowers
and we are very good at them. But we may expand the Arena brand. We own various other Arena domains but we are in no rush to push them until we
feel that we have really delivered the best possible service for UK flower lovers. Things like expanding our offering for business customers, where we’ve already
developed Arena For Business, a unique set of tools to save business time and increase accountability. Pushing that side of the business will be important for us, as
well as other areas like weddings, which is a huge market in the UK and often not that well served.
We have watched similar companies to ours expand their offering and it can look a bit tacked on and un-thought-through.
It makes one wonder if they’re doing it because they can’t make enough out of the core flower business and are scrabbling around for other ways to generate revenue.
For us, the core flower business has to be robust and standalone, with no propping up from other categories.
Thereafter, we can take our time to work out what we want to do next.
Source: www.econsultancy.comnews-blognewsletter3722arena-flowers-8217-sam-barton-on-web-design- and-development.html
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