Impact Of E-commerce On Business And Brexit: A Case Study For SMEs

Introduction to E-commerce

E-business is the new way of doing business. The procedure of doing e-business happens over the internet. Electronic devices are procured into the business transactions such as purchasing and selling of the products, supplying the services, customer service, processing the payment transactions and managing the manufacturing control. It is also used in having collaboration with the business partners, sharing the information, recruiting and having an automated employee service. There are numerous functions and services in the e-commerce section of a business enterprise that ranged from the advancement of the intranets and extranets to e-service. In the current business context, most of the business enterprises are constantly rethinking about their business operations in terms of the internet, primarily for its availability, ability to reach wide audience and ever-changing abilities.

This study will outline the extent to which Brexit is likely to have its impact on the legal and security of e-commerce aspects for SME businesses. It will outline a migration plan for developing an e-business activity in a SME business. The study will identify the impacts on the organisation and changes that e-commerce will being to its infrastructure. It will also identify the major benefits of having e-commerce strategy and will also outline the suggestions for measuring them. In addition to this, the study will also recognise the major risks and also portray the strategies to diminish them.        

Lion Hudson is book Publishing Corporation entitled in UK. The stated firm is headquartered in Oxford, England. It has currently around 54 employees to handle its business operations. It is an independent, public and unlisted corporation. The stated firm is concerned in publishing quality literature, which is true to the Christian faith. It publishes books for adults and children under five dissimilar imprints. The books published from the stated organisation sell around the world and are translated into over 200 languages. The main strength of the Lion Hudson is its international co-edition publishing.     

Successful execution of any e-commerce commerce is reliant on the implementation or adoption of seven steps. These steps are:

1. Strategic business planning and roadmaps: It is important for Lion Hudson to create a roadmap for its e-commerce strategy. It is important as strategy is about making the right choices that will assist the said business enterprise objectives. The company should create a strategy that must have clear vision, mission, and objective on what will be achieved. The stated firm must acknowledge how much time, and within what budget with the recognition of the right resources on its roadmap for getting proper e-commerce strategy(Snehota and Tunisini, 2007). The management of the said enterprise must have proper knowledge about the digital marketing tools and techniques which will assist in reaching and acquiring consumers. It is important for Lion Hudson that its published books reach out to the customers who are online with numerous devices and dimensions.  
2. Selection of the technology and analysis of the website: lion Hudson in order to deliver maximum advantage to the end consumers, the chosen e-commerce technology must be completely able to being customizable(Srinivasan and Sundaram, 2006). It must be also able to complement to the business model and must also adhere to the best practices to offline retail of the stated business enterprise.
3. Customer acquisition: for every business enterprise, irrespective of its trade industry, customer acquisition is very important. It is evident that online digital marketing comprises multiple tools in order to reach out to the new generation for the customers, who are actively engaged in utilising multiple devices. It will be important for lion Hudson to note that the cost of the customer acquisition will be very high for SME as they will be newly establishing or portraying its products offerings on online.
4. Customer engagement: For Lion Hudson, it is important to engage with its buyers as in the current business scenarios, consumers are actively seeking to involve with the brands to acknowledge the unique value preposition that brand offers(Piscevic and Simic, 2009). If Lion Hudson engages with customers through various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter; it will also instils quality assurance in the minds of the customers.
5. Customer Retention: with the advancement in technologies in e-commerce sector, Lion Hudson will be able to leverage on almost one to one customer experience. It will be the best thing that a customer could expect from a book publishing company. Lion Hudson must look out for latest technologies and way to enhance their customer experience.
6. Optimisation grounded on important metrics: For the proper execution of an e-commerce strategy, it is important to measure the health of an e-commerce venture regarding the total value generated(Piscevic and Simic, 2009). Another important thing that must be optimised by Lion Hudson is the cost of customer acquisition, % of customer converted and the % of the viewer’s entering into the company’s website.             
7. Business analysis and customer insight: the final step in the roadmap of a proper implementation of an e-commerce strategy is the analysis of the business(Nkongo Flore, 2014). Understanding the product categories which have performed well over the other products must be listed.

In the current competitive environment, if an e-commerce strategy is planned and executed well, it can increase the brand awareness, enhance the revenues and will help the corporation in delivering superior customer services.   

E-commerce has been the fastest and most important initiative for the companies to consider in the current business scenarios. E-commerce has its impacts on the various aspects of an organisation, which includes the strategy, human resources, customer relationship management, business environment, and service management and performance metrics. Implementation of e-commerce in a company requires the organisational reconstructing and alignment, revised approaches and policies and new job descriptions. The influence of e-commerce on an organisation can impact the business efficiency and can be felt upon all over the organisation operations. The impact of e-business on a company’s effectiveness is on its overall financial well-being (Mesia Dhas and Bharathi, 2016). According to Dalton, the advancement in technology businesses can help a firm in achieving noteworthy improvements and cost reductions in several key functions. A proper implementation of e-commerce strategy in an organisation helps in the internal communication, enhancement in the product development team, knowledge management and also provides more time to market.           

Understanding the Impact of Brexit

It is important to state here that by adopting the initiatives such as electronic procurement, online marketing and e-service, and by effective financial transactions, more than 75% of the UK companies have achieved the cost saving. There has been constant enhancement in the number and value of the electronic transactions between the businesses, and consumers are also steadily increasing (Maditinos, Chatzoudes and Sarigiannidis, 2014). Execution of e-commerce initiatives for the Lion Hudson which must include the e-procurement, online sales and order purchasing, electronic service will enable the firm the change the method of interaction and doing commerce with the suppliers and the customers.

Implementation of e-commerce is very good method to save costs and enhance the efficiency with the assistance of e-commerce in to order to handle a corporation’s interaction with consumers and suppliers electronically. It not only helps in making the interaction or communication faster but also makes it cost effective. Another good thing is that it helps in saving lots of paper. It is evident that every book publishing company has to procure some inventory and goods, which is used to run the business activity. Hence, e-procurement helps in saving lots of money when vendors have to face the competition in an electronically open market. According to Minoli 2005, having electronic process information in the business and across its whole value chain helps in avoiding the re-entering data, diminishes the errors, saves costs for personal enterprises and also runs the overall procedures a lot faster (Liang and Turban, 2011). In addition to this, it also eases a business enterprise stock management, which also helps in saving money.   

Another advantage of e-commerce is the fact that book publishers can publish their books titles in stock over an internet or e-commerce websites. It is helpful for those customers who wants to get books of certain publisher in a store but gets disappointment. Lion Hudson on the information provided to the website can also be combining with the advertisements of its own store to an online selling system that could give them the possibility to attain huge number of potential consumers (Liang and Turban, 2011). In addition to this, the stated organisation could also give its website space for advertisement and could sell it to create extra revenue. Selling e-books can save cost for transport for Lion Hudson, package and printing as customers with e-procurement could simply download the e-books. But many surveys have shown that e-books are not generally accepted by the book-purchasers as its lacks the experience of holding a real book in hands.   

Migration Plan for Developing E-business Activity in a SME

When an organisation optimise its website to enhance the conversions, establishing the ways to monitor the effectiveness of the efforts is also important. Some of the method which Lion Hudson can utilise to measure its e-commerce success are:

1. Bottom Line net profit: Many organisations believe that enhancing the sales and revenue is the key way to measure the success of business, but this is not the complete picture(Karakaya and Shea, 2008). It is important to look at the profit margins to monitor the success. In order to attain the bottom line, Lion Hudson should make sure that it is subtracting the extra expenses for its revenue to get a complete picture of its e-commerce profits.   
2. Conversion rate of visitors: it is evident that all websites are created with an intention. It may be for sales, leading the audiences or interacting with them. In order to calculate the conversation rate, Lion Hudson has to divide the number of visitors who did the expected action by the total number of visitors(Karakaya and Shea, 2008). If the conversion rate is less than 4%, there will be chances for many different strategies that could turn the company’s website visitors to customers.  
3. Average value per transaction: Lion Hudson must pay attention to all the transactions including the low-values products and the high-values products. It must consider in developing some cross-selling strategies such as profit suggestions, which would be based on its selected items.

E-commerce is demarcated as the purchasing and selling of products and services on the electronic devices and platforms such as internet or other computer networks. There has been huge enhancement in the in level of commerce conducted electronically due to penetration of the internet (Chaffey, 2011). But with the advancement in the business activities, there are also rise in the threats and risks in the business operations.

Here are some of the major risks associated with e-commerce:

1. Privacy: one of the principal threats for the consumers in the e-commerce is the rise of identity theft. Impersonation and its related terms are the major concern for the consumers that is a major risk for the organisations operating on e-commerce platforms. Data security is another major risk linked with e-commerce.

It is important that organisations share the privacy issues with the cyber security and e-commerce security experts (Chaffey, 2011). Companies must make sure that the data and the information are not modified or altered or tampered by an unauthorised individual.

1. Requirement of SEO: Most of the e-commerce websites are not placed at the top of the search engines. So, companies have to use SEO in order to position its websites at the top of the SERP by delivering descriptions of the products which must contain unique content. Lack of visitors to the website on the company’s online business is an indication that audiences don’t know about existence of the website.

This kind of problem can be tackled by the utilisation of SEO. For utilising the SEO, organisations just need to have good content, which simply does not means to stuff the website with the key words. Paid Advertising is another method to attain audiences to a particular websites (Butaney, 2007). As for illustration, Google Adwards is very effective for targeting a niche market. It can be expensive for advertising, but it surely diverts the audience to the website. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube can also be used to alert and direct people towards a particular website.   

The book publishing enterprises of UK has a strong culture and commercial capacity that partakes to the economy and society of UK. The UK publishing industry gets the growth and success both domestically and internationally for its Oscar winning films and stage shows by shaping the minds of the next generations. British publishers do its business to every international market and have seen noteworthy progress in the Latin Americas, North Africa, South Asia and Middle East. It is important to state that the UK book and journal publishing industry is worth £4.4 billion. While UK books are exported to every region or nations around the world, Europe is still the strongest market for the UK published material. The physical sales accounted to Europe are more than 35% of the total export revenues of the UK book publishers.   

Book publishers are reporting for the changes in their business investment plans and there is concern on the uncertainty raised by The Brexit. Uncertainty in business is surely not good for the economy and this negative outlook will continue until the confidence is restored (Ayris, 2017). After the Brexit, the rules and regulations have become different as UK is no longer the part of EU. Authors’ earning could also be affected by the loss of UK publishers of the exclusivity of Europe. Removal of the British Bok publishers from European single market could also spell the resurrection of the tariffs on the products entering in the EU.

Conclusion:

It has been found in the study that implementation of e-commerce is very good method to save costs and enhance the efficiency with the assistance of e-commerce in to order to handle a corporation’s interaction with consumers and suppliers electronically. It not only helps in making the interaction or communication faster but also makes it cost effective. Another good thing is that it helps in saving lots of paper. It is evident that every book publishing company has to procure some inventory and goods, which is used to run the business activity. Hence, e-procurement helps in saving lots of money when vendors have to face the competition in an electronically open market.

References:

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Snehota, I. and Tunisini, A. (2007). Commentary on “Business-to-Business Marketing Textbooks: A Comparative Review”. Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, 14(4), pp.93-97.

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