Discuss about the Report for E-Business of Harrys.com.
Since the medieval royalty to the soldiers of World War II, men shaved their faces using a single blade. Safety razors are associated with providing the smoothest shave; nonetheless, business corporations continue to sell razors with more than one blade. There are various renowned companies that trade in safety razors and multi-blades, including dollar shave, Gillette, and Harry’s. Harrys.com is a business to consumer (B2C) business website that majors in trading personalized high-quality blades, cream for shaving, as well as affordable blades for replacement. Harry’s online business site was founded by Jeff Raider and Andy Katz in April 2013; however, Harry’s launched its first physical brick and motor shaving shop in October of the same year in New York City, USA (Polo et al., 2015). With the strong urge to grow its business, the company purchased a Germany razor manufacturing factory worth $100 million (Delrey, 2014). Harrys.com is a web-based start-up that is developed on the principles of offering consumers “simple, superior, and affordable shaving solutions.” The company sells its products online through online subscriptions. Harry’s is a fully established brand now that is continually winning customers from across the US. The key competitor’s of the company are Gillette, Schick, Bic, and Dollar Shave Club. Harrys.com controls approximately 5% of the market share (Bartels, 2000).
As aforementioned, Harrys.com is a business to consumer retailing website that majors in men shaving products. The business site is simple to use; customers are only required to subscribe to the company’s offerings, and the shaving supplies are directly mailed to the customer’s mailbox at low price and at specified frequency (Spence, 2014). Despite its newness in the marketplace, the business model of the company has enabled Harrys.com to reach more than two million customers in just over two years in business. New customers continue to subscribe to Harrys.com while the company maintains approximately 60% retention rate of all subscribed customers. To achieve maximum revenues, the company manufactures all its products and owns all the distribution means.
Business applications are defined as computer-based information systems essential for providing automated support to the company’s operations. E-business application on the other hand, is an information and communication technology application that supports all business activities of a given internet business (IOANNIS, 2015). For instance, commerce comprises of trading goods and service among businesses, individuals and groups is regarded as a crucial part of any trading organization. Internet commerce is especially centered on ICT to create external business activities and relations of the company with groups, other companies, and individuals. Electronic-business application is a wide entity that deals with the whole business system which comprises of companies that use internet medium to execute its business services or assist its specialized or overall business operations. E-business application also covers e-commerce and e-marketing (Feloni, 2015). E-commerce mainly describes the transactional context of the business. E-marketing involves providing an electronic medium through which a company can accomplish its marketing objectives.
Harry’s use their website to attract new potential customers through e-advertising and e-marketing and enhancing the efficiency of their services through e-support and e-service functions, and widening its reach and extent through the web by uploading their services and products on the web. The company uses a web business application to increase sales, reduce marketing costs, increase customer accessibility as well as communicate directly to consumers. Harrys.com use online subscriptions (Business to Consumer (B2C)); after a customer subscribes to the company site, the products are then mailed directly to the customer’s mailbox (Barclay, 2014).
For Harry’s, internet marketing strategies are an indispensable part of the company’s business plan. Given the urge to be on a leading spot as a provider of consumer shaving products, Harry’s have made their retail website easy to access in order to reach a wider customer base. Furthermore, the 21st century is made up of up to 63% population that has knowledge and can successfully make digital purchases and thus Harry’s, a web based company has directed its marketing efforts to the internet to attract as well as maintain customers (University Alliance, 2016). E-marketing strategies include:
Harry’s e-marketing comprises of all the above online marketing strategies. The growth of smartphone use has empowered a massive population to access the internet through their mobile devices. The company has thus optimized its website making it mobile friendly to allow the wider population to access company cont and products using the mobile phones (University Alliance, 2016). Accordingly, social media is another massive marketing platform that Harry’s use to promote its products as well as attract new customers. In the same breadth, the company encourages its customers to use their social networks to refer new customers to the company. In addition, email marketing is at the core of the company’s marketing activities; it is through email subscriptions that Harry’s manages to communicate frequently with their customers together with mailing products to their customers (University Alliance, 2016). Content marketing is another key online marketing strategy that Harry’s use to market and promote its products. Internet publicity about the company’s services has done magic to building trust, credibility, authority and creating inbound links with its audience (University Alliance, 2016).
According to Kepes (2014), the biggest challenge for e-commerce businesses is inventory management; having enough inventories to run the business without failing your customers is always the key to success. E-retailers are thriving at exponential rates as compared to conventional retailing models due to their supply chain management strategies. From abovementioned, Harry’s use a direct to consumer business model, in this regard; the company manufactures all its products and sells them direct to final consumers (Trusson et al., 2014). The company does not deal with intermediaries or use drop shipping or wholesale suppliers. After purchasing nearly a century old shaving blade manufacturing company in Germany, Harry’s manufactures its own supreme quality blades and high-end handles which are then shipped directly to the customer on order.
E-commerce security strategies
Online businesses are prone to massive online security challenges. In response to this, online companies work to provide security at all levels of the organization to keep their business from harm. In accordance with this, e-commerce us a 5 point website security strategy to keep out intruders:
Backup & Redundancy: storing company information in another secure location whereby when something happens to your information in the primary storage, the same information can be retrieved from the backup storage. Harry’s use cloud based backup storage to secure its critical information from malicious online actors (Johns, 2016).
PCI Compliance: security standard council that ensures best practices for payment account security. Harry’s is fully compliant to PCI by following the tokenization method.
Encryption: online companies must encrypt their data in order to ensure that only authorized individuals can access. Harry’s use data encryption protocol to ensure its website is secure.
DDoS protection: Harry’s has protected its e-commerce business against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using different tools, including 800lb free tool and CloudFlare (Johns, 2016).
Firewalls: firewalls are used for allowing or disallowing traffic based on what the company has authorized. Harry’s use firewalls to block unauthorized traffic as well as malicious internet traffic from accessing the company’s network system (Johns, 2016).
“IT infrastructure is a set of combined hardware, software, networks, and facilities in order to develop, test, deliver, monitor, control or support IT services.” IT infrastructure is needed for the existence, operation as well as management of an e-business. For instance, it allows organisations deliver IT solutions and services customers, employees as well as partners. Harry’s use public WANs and public cloud to transport mechanisms along with software as a service. The IT infrastructure provides a suitable platform necessary for IT applications and functions for Harry’s.
Conclusion and Recommendations
E-business (electronic business) provides a platform for conducting businesses processes through its business website. Internet business procedures is composed of trading products, services, and supplies; processing payments, customer servicing, production control managing, work together with business partners, and information sharing. This report using harrys.com has exhaustively discussed different aspects of e-business including company operations, the ease of using the company’s site, the e-business application used by the company and e-marketing strategies. Consequently, the report also has evaluated e-commerce supply chain strategies, e-commerce security strategies and IT architecture. The following are the recommendations for Harry’s Company:
Integrate online marketing strategies with social media marketing strategies in order widen its customer base while increasing its profitability.
Venture into new product lines like boutique rather than relying on shaving products alone
Improve its IT architecture.
Barclay, D.A., 2014. Serving online customers: lessons for libraries from the business world. Rowman & Littlefield.
Bartels, A. 2000. The difference between e-business and e-commerce. Available Online at: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2588708/e-commerce/e-commerce-the-difference-between-e-business-and-e-commerce.html
Delrey, J. 2014. Razor Startup Harry’s Raises $75 Million, Pushing It Over $200 Million. Say What? Available Online at: https://www.recode.net/2014/12/3/11633506/razor-startup-harrys-raises-75-million-pushing-it-over-200-million
Feloni, R. 2015. The CEOs of shaving startup Harry’s explain how they acquired a million customers in 2 years. Available Online at: https://uk.businessinsider.com/harrys-ceos-explain-how-they-acquired-a-million-customers-in-2-years-2015-12
Fox, A.R. and Wilson, E.G., 2015. Networking and the development of professionals: Beginning teachers building social capital. Teaching and Teacher Education, 47, pp.93-107. (Fox & Wilson, 2015)
IOANNIS, S., 2015. Design, analysis and presentation of Intrusion Detection Systems (Doctoral dissertation, TECHNOLOGICAL EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CRETE).
Johns, J. 2016. 5 Pillars of Website Security for E-commerce Retailers. Available at: https://dropsuite.com/5-pillars-website-security-e-commerce-retailers/
Kepes, B. 2014. Harry’s: Disrupting Shaving and Making E-Commerce Impossible. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/02/05/harrys-disrupting-shaving-and-making-e-commerce-impossible/#5be7399238bd
Polo Pena, A.I., Frias Jamilena, D.M. and Castaneda Garcia, J.A., 2015. Market orientation and business results among smallâ€Âscale service firms. Academia Revista Latinoamericana de Administración, 28(1), pp.135-166.
Spence, R. 2014. Why having retailer Harry’s is not your average online startup. Available Online at: https://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/fp-startups/why-shaving-retailer-harrys-is-not-your-average-online-startup?__lsa=e9d1-1c04
Trusson, C.R., Doherty, N.F. and Hislop, D., 2014. Knowledge sharing using IT service management tools: conflicting discourses and incompatible practices. Information Systems Journal, 24(4), pp.347-371.
University Alliance, 2016. Internet Marketing Strategies. Available Online at: https://www.usanfranonline.com/resources/internet-marketing/internet-marketing-strategies/#
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