Steve’s T-shirt Business: Benefits Of An E-Commerce Website

Aims and Objectives of the Website

Steve had been running his T-shirt business for almost a decade now. He sells mostly customized t-shirts in Sydney. Having started his business all alone, now he works with 10 other employees. He has grown tremendously. Presently, his business model includes customers either calling him over the phone or visiting one of his shops to order for their favorite tees. Nevertheless, the rise in technological complications in the modern society has proved to be a challenge to Steve as well. He is in a dilemma about how he can manage to pull of an online business model to compete the present scenario, thus gain back his slowly fading glory. This report aims at providing a complete overview of Steve’s business model and throws light on how the use of a website can benefit him profoundly. Each aspect of a website-based business shall be discussed in details. Further, into the report, examples of other similar websites shall also be drawn to create a reference to how a website-driven business works. Lastly, the marketing and security management techniques shall also be explained.

Steve’s Collection is the name given to the website. The website is named after the business itself.

E-Commerce or electronic commerce is a term used for any kind of commercial transaction or business, which uses the internet to transfer information and other valuable digital resources. This is presently one of the most important Internet aspects to research, implement and emerge (Laudon and Traver 2013).

To justify the name of the website, it must be stated that this is a website for the T-shirt business of Steve, from Australia. Steve, for ten long years had been successfully running his t-shirt business in Sydney and other parts of the country. However, with the advent of time and technology, the model and way of doing business has changed drastically. Steve, having realized the need to cope up with the changing nature of this business, decided to go online. The decision of designing, developing and introducing a website to promote the business is a major ask. The website is being built with the motive to drive more customer traffic through online interaction. This will not only allow regular customers to browse through the stocks from a remote location, but will also bring in new customers who wish to look for alternatives through online premises. This might help the business to reach new heights (Toufaily, Ricard and Perrien 2013). 

Problems and Opportunities Identified

The E-commerce business model allows consumers and sellers exchange products and services without the distance or time barrier. Therefore, through Steve’s E-commerce website, the goals are uniquely set to achieve quite a handsome number of aims and objectives. The aims that the website wishes to achieve are as follows:

• Create market awareness: The foremost aim of the website would be to drive the company’s name and fame onto a global level. Anybody, from any part of the world shall then be able to access the website and get to know more about the company and the products it sells. Further, it is now necessary for the company to spread out its wings once again, from amongst the new tech-savvy companies in the market. The website also takes the help of the most common social media websites to ensure that a vast reach is achieved. This also helps in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and hence promotes the website on the World Wide Web. This affects the growth of the business in a more positive way (McIntyre 2015).
• Promote company goods: Another very important aspect of the website-based business is to promote the unique designs of customized t-shirts that the company sells. Customers are expected to look them up on the website. Therefore, the rich and beautiful designs made by the company are no longer bounded to the store walls. People from all over can now view and order their favorite designs.
• Customer Service and Satisfaction: The website is being designed with an aim to provide a neat and attractive user interface to the visitors. The customers will be provided with the interface through which they can browse through the complete collection of t-shirts available. They can choose their favorite t-shirts from amongst the male, female and kid’s section (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). The website also must have the feature to let its visitors order directly from the website by pressing the “Place order” button. The users are also to be presented with the opportunity to compare the t-shirts with the prices and quality offered by other competitors.
• Ensure growth: The introduction of the website into the business model will not only help to ensure growth economically, but will also help the company to enrich their quality of service. With the facility to collect customer feedbacks, the company can analyze this data and remold their products and services accordingly. 

The website is being published with the prime motive to reach out to the mass. The website is meant to appeal audience from all gender and age groups. The store has a variety of t-shirt collections to choose from, for both males and females. A wide range of t-shirts is also available for kids. The website’s easy to use interface will allow all sorts of customers to browse through the sections. One need not be tech-savvy to use this website. Furthermore, for people who are leading a busy life or are distanced from the store, the website will prove to be a lifeline.

To design an e-commerce website from a pre-existing business model leaves a vast scope of opportunities to attend and develop. In the problem identification phase, a variety of problems is to be presented and possible ways to count them as opportunities and overcome those problems. The problems and opportunities identified are listed below:

• A responsive design: To design a responsive web design is considered the prime task. This must be taken as a scope of opportunity to capture the market through an attractive multi-platform website. The designer needs to appreciate the fact that the website contents remain fluid on all devices with a variety of resolutions and screen sizes. The Responsive design approach shall be adapted to solve this problem and grab this opportunity to rule the market. It must be noted that the majority of internet users in the modern society log in from their mobile devices (Bryant and Jones 2012).
• Promotion: To be able to properly promote the website to enhance the marketing opportunities is extremely important. The website must be brought up to higher SEO levels as it is a known fact that an internet user does not surf the second page on a search engine. It is also necessary to link the website to all the social media handles of the company.
• Management: With the increase in customer traffic, the responsibility of management also increases. The working system is bound to a massive change as an effect of the website implementation. Orders for the t-shirts can now be placed through the website; hence, the store management must keep track of such orders and respond accordingly. Online service must also be kept active to reply to or analyze all customer reviews. The store management must plan of new ways to sell the online ordered goods.
• Security: This is one of the most important problem or issue of website building that must be addressed. With the rise of big data collection in modern e-commerce website, the e-risks are also at a high. The security concerns and measures shall be discussed in a later point of the report. 

As mentioned earlier, the website is aimed at providing service to all ages and genders of people. The contents on the website shall be strictly restricted to information about the company and the variety of t-shirts that it promotes and sells. All t-shirt images used are respectively denoted to the male, female and kid’s sections. The t-shirt images to be used in the website shall describe the beauty of the works done by the company, the artistic customizations made on the shirts. In the About and Contact Us tabs, the details about the company is to be shared.

https://www.printlocker.com.au/ and https://www.chargrilled.com.au are two of the finest examples of customizable t-shirt selling website, working from Australia. They offer the finest interface for their customers with a wide range designs to choose from and order accordingly. Printlocker.com provides almost two thousand designs to preview on the t-shirts and other products that they sell. Chargrilled.com on the other hand has limited resources, but the web interface is extremely simple to browse for all kinds of customers.

www.vistaprint.in and https://6dollarshirts.com/ are the two websites that come under the same domain but cannot be counted as the best in the online business. Vistaprint.in has fairly modest collection in their online showcase, however their website lacks a responsive layout. This is the most negative aspect for a website that wills to boom in this decade of web advancements. 6dollarshirts.com offers quite a handsome range of designs and products; however, they lack the attractive designing sense. The website looks extremely clumsy with images and texts animating all over the screen.

Examples of Similar Websites

The website consists of SEVEN webpages. Six of them are navigable from the navigation bar on each page. The “order” can only be accessed when the user places an order. Each of the webpages has the .html type. The graphical contents used in the website are mostly .jpeg and .png.

The website needs to advertise on a vast scale to reach the sky-high limits. The website shall be having the links to the social media handles of the company. These social media handles on the other hand must be used to promote the website. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are few of the most common social media platforms chosen by thousands of business forums to promote their business. Furthermore, the stores of the company shall be used to spread awareness about their new online facility. Each customer is needed to be handed out a leaflet with the website name and description.

With an online platform, the threat to information and privacy intensifies. The customers are requested to share their e-mail addresses on the website for subscription. This has a great need to ensure that security is maintained on the website. E-mail id, being a personal identifier may lead the individual to huge problems if it gets into wrong hands. The website must make use of encryption techniques to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks on the customer-shared information. The major threat issue would arise when the website would introduce an online payment option. A trustworthy and recommended payment gateway must be installed and they must be allowed to handle all sorts of payment options with the security tools that they provide for the best of reasons and services. Lastly, the website can also be fitted with web protection that are now available from best of the online security providers. 

Conclusion

From the above report, it can hence be concluded that the website will help to improve the business model for Steve’s t-shirt company. The website can help the business to travel miles across the regular barriers of time and distance. This would also help Steve’s company to compete in the modern race for online dominance. An interactive website with fair and attractive contents will bring in tons of new customers, thus enhancing the name and fame of the company, in addition to the economic gains. However, it must be noted that the website is designed and developed keeping in mind the basics of the business and the business model is accordingly adjusted to fit in the upcoming changes. The website designer must also address all the security concerns regarding an online business and implement the necessary measures to protect customer’s and company’s private information.

The website developers and the company must grab the future opportunity to implement online payment through the website. This would also require a delivery service. The change in business pattern must be followed keenly and provided changes must be made as soon as possible. The registered customers must be given special discounts and they must be informed via their provided email ids. 

References

Bryant, J. and Jones, M., 2012. Responsive web design. In Pro HTML5 Performance (pp. 37-49). Apress, Berkeley, CA.

Huang, Z. and Benyoucef, M., 2013. From e-commerce to social commerce: A close look at design features. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 12(4), pp.246-259.

Laudon, K.C. and Traver, C.G., 2013. E-commerce. Pearson.

McIntyre, E.S., 2015. Search engine optimization. ON October, 11.

Toufaily, E., Ricard, L. and Perrien, J., 2013. Customer loyalty to a commercial website: Descriptive meta-analysis of the empirical literature and proposal of an integrative model. Journal of Business Research, 66(9), pp.1436-1447.