E-Business Strategy For River Island: Creating Competitive Advantages In Global Market

Proposal Focus

The main aim of this proposal is to demonstrate the e-business procedure of the River Island Company which is a fashion and retail industry present in London, United Kingdom. The company serve the worldwide people with the help of e-business strategy and therefore the process that makes the firm in one of the leading position is also another motive of this proposal. In addition, the proposal also helps in demonstrating the implementation of the e-business strategy by the River Island firm of the United Kingdom.

The objectives of this proposal are as follows:

• To implement the digital transformation of the River Island firm of the United Kingdom
• To investigate the importance of e-business for creating a competitive advantage of this River Island firm
• To evaluate the e-business strategies and models that essential for the River Island Company in the United States

River Island is a leading fashion brand the UK that possess about 350 stores across the country and with the help of e-business strategy the firm serve in all locations of this country. In addition, the e-business strategy also helps the firm to increase their business in the global environment and therefore in the present day it operates internationally throughout Europe, Asia, Middle East and Ireland (Carayannis, Sindakis and Walter, 2015). After reviewing the company e-business strategies, it is evaluated that both e-business and information provides a huge competitive advantage of this firm in the international market. It is seen that River Island falls into the category of B2C (Business to Consumer) e-business and therefore advances in communication technology and information provides a wide range of electronic applications and business models (Spieth, Schneckenberg and Ricart, 2014).

 With the help of these applications, the organization provides a competitive advantage by creating efficiencies and cost reductions respectively. Besides this, with the help of an information system the River Island firm can reduce the costs of business procedures or shift the cost of doing business that eventually reduces the operating costs of the firm. Therefore, this cost leadership aspect will provide a competitive advantage of the firm in the global market and River Island thereby uses this e-business industry to gain a leading position in the market both nationally and internationally. Apart from this, by following e-business strategy, the River Island Company can establish their brand in the foreign market and innovate their products in accordance with the new market (Soto-Acosta, Popa and Palacios-Marqués, 2016). This innovative approach helps the firm to create a position among the consumer base of this respective, and thereby it creates a competitive advantage of this firm in the international market.

E-business strategy is the procedure by which a company sells their products or services through online and for this proper design and planning should be important for a particular firm. In order to create an information and e-business strategy, the firm should create a sophisticated management system and a strategy that eventually combines the elements necessary for the business. Therefore for designing and implementing an information and e-business strategy, the firm River Island takes into account on the various aspects that before starting their e-business in the global market (Arora, Arora and Sivakumar, 2016). Hence, in accordance with the political environment the firm collect information about the current ruling party of the country and also the political impact on the e-commerce market. In other words, regarding the legal environment, the firm has to know about the rules and regulations related to the e-commerce market, and after starting the business, they have to follow all legal rules of the respective country (Wiengarten, Bhakoo, and Gimenez, 2015).

Objectives of the Proposal

Apart from this, the firm should collect information about the consumer needs of the particular country where they are going to expand their online e-business procedure. Also, the management team should collect information about the social class as well as the social environment, and in accordance with that, they should innovate their services. Lastly, they should maintain an ethical relation with the consumers of the new country so that it easily build the trust of the consumer groups on the respective firm (Tamayo-Torres et al., 2016). Hence, it is clear that before designing and implementing an information and e-business strategy both in the local and international market, the firm should be aware of these respective factors.

 In the today’s environment internet is constantly evolving that provides huge benefits to the e-business market, and therefore several e-business strategies are evolving that proven successful to drive revenue and also to promote the company both through offline and online mode (Palacios-Marqués, Soto-Acosta, and Merigó, 2015). Therefore the e-business strategies that should be followed by a firm are as follows:

Hosting of marketplace

Many e-business companies have become successful by hosting a site in the marketplace through online stores and auctions procedures. The strategy is mainly based on offering sales on the various products or services of the respective firm (Yeh, Lee, and Pai, 2015). Therefore, with the help of this strategy, the firm not only increase the sales rate but it also promotes their brand in the selected marketplace.

Turnkey businesses

The business functions constitute the pre-existing template of its respective company. By following this strategy, the website offers their products at certain discounts in accordance with the people of the particular city (Kurucz et al., 2017). Therefore, this strategy possesses a stiff competition in the market.

Ad-supported content

Some websites develop their e-business process through frequent and content updates, blogs and similar informative sites and this involves the selling advertisement of their respective product and services (Soomro, Shah, and Ahmed, 2016). Hence, this indirect e-business strategy also provides huge success in selling the product or services in the respective market.

Social media

Most of the e-commerce firm advertise their products or services in the social media content so that the consumer should easily know about their brand. The advertisement is given in such a manner that it creates a broad scope with a cultural, geographical and interest-based theme (Kurucz et al., 2017). Therefore with the help of this strategy, the firm can easily promote their e-commerce business to the consumer groups of the particular country.

There are four types of e-commerce model, and all of them has respective characteristics in the e-business procedures.

Business to business (B2B) – This model demonstrates all electronic dealings and transactions between organization and producer dealings with retailers and conventional wholesalers (Soomro, Shah and Ahmed, 2016).

Business to Consumer (B2C) – This model defines the relationship and transactions between businesses and customers through the online procedure (Pedersen, Gwozdz and Hvass, 2018). With the help of the internet, the companies sales their products and services to the consumer base of the nation.

E-Business and Information for Competitive Advantage

Consumer to Consumer (C2C) – The model consists of electronic transactions of goods and services between third party members (Cortimiglia, Ghezzi and Frank, 2016). This procedure is simply defined when old items are bought and sold through online media from one consumer to other.

Business to Administration (B2A) – The model constitutes the e-commerce transactions between organizations and public administration (Pedersen, Gwozdz and Hvass, 2018). It constitutes various services like fiscal measures, social security, employment and legal documents.

Among all these e-business strategies and models, it is recommended that a firm should use the easiest strategy and attractive e-business model that provides huge benefits to the firm. In the present day all business are related to the consumer base, and therefore, the e-commerce company should use business to consumer (B2C) model so that they can easily increase their profitability in the corresponding market.

Also, it is also recommended that by using social media e-business strategy the firm can easily promote their brand among the consumer base of the particular country. In the world of technology, people often use social media to communicate with their families, friends and closed ones. Therefore choosing this platform for enhancing brand awareness is considered to be the best approach for the e-commerce firm. 

After reviewing the proposal, it is evaluated that the e-commerce business provides various benefits as well as opportunities to the firm both nationally and internationally (Cortimiglia, Ghezzi and Frank, 2016). Therefore a table is drawn that summarizes the costs and benefits of using e-business procedure by a firm through nationally and internationally respectively.

New technology or approach	Benefits and costs
Communication technology and information	Advancement in communication technologies and information provides a wide range of electronic applications and business models that helpful for the firm to create efficiencies and reduce operating costs
Information system	It enhances the cost leadership aspect and thereby provides huge benefits to the firm in maintaining their position in the market. To innovate the technology of the information system a cost of 3000 to 6521 dollars should be required by the firm
Marketplace hosting	This strategy helped the e-commerce brand to promote their firm in the selected market and provides a huge advantage to attract a large number of the consumer base
Ad-supported content	Advertisement through contents and blogs help the firm to establish their position among the consumer base that eventually helps in enhancing their business growth, and it involves a low-cost rate in comparison to the offline promoting procedure
Social media	With the help of social media, the firm promotes their products and services among consumer of the particular city and thereby successful in gaining targeted customer attention. The advertisement includes the low cost of price in comparison to doing advertisement through offline mode

Table 1: The costs and benefits of the new technology or approach used by e-business firm

Project management techniques are the process that helps the firm to innovate their methods, technologies and skills for managing the projects efficiently. The project management technologies that should be applied to plan the implementation of information and e-business strategy are scrum and sprint techniques (Saebi and Foss, 2015). Scrum is considered as the agile process that focuses only on delivering the highest business value in considering the shortest period. This project techniques repeatedly and rapidly update their working software once every two weeks of a month. Due to this reason, these techniques help the e-business companies to set their priorities and thereby organize in such a manner that it delivers the products or services in respect to the priorities (Soomro, Shah and Ahmed, 2016).

Another benefit of applying this project management techniques is that no specific engineering procedures are required for updating the software, and thereby it creates an agile environment for delivering the projects. In addition, another project management technique known as the sprints is also useful to plan the implementation of an information and e-business strategy by a firm (Altamony et al., 2016). This technique is considered as a part of sprints project that analogous to extreme interactions of programming procedure. With the help of this technique, the products or services of the e-commerce firm had been coded, designed and tested so that after its application no negative impact will thereby occur on the company business procedure. Therefore, both these techniques will help in planning the information and e-business strategy of the e-commerce firm.

Designing and Implementing an Information and E-Business Strategy

Apart from this, using these techniques can cause various risks for the firm and therefore proper risks assessment is necessary for information and e-business implementation procedure. One of the risks assessment is that the firm only should work on certain software that after upgrading automatically cannot cause any hindrance in the working procedure (Talet, Mat-Zin and Houari, 2014). In addition, the design and code that are used for the sprints techniques should be carefully checked so that no wrong code or design will take place and thereby the risks should reduce.

Some recommendations that should be used for the digital business are as follows:

It is recommended that the digital strategic plan should be upgraded in accordance with the current market needs. With the advancement of technology consumer needs is changing, therefore, to cope up with their behavior it is necessary that the firm should update their strategic plan with more efficient, tactics and channels that can provide a positive impact on their business outcomes.

Another recommendation is that digital businesses should integrate new technologies and options so that they can adopt the changing environment of the world. In order to adopt the changing consumer trends, newer technologies should be used so that it eventually increases the creditability, importance, transparency and value of the firm in a particular country. 

References

Altamony, H., Al-Salti, Z., Gharaibeh, A. and Elyas, T., 2016. The relationship between change management strategy and successful enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations: A theoretical perspective. International Journal of Business Management and Economic Research, 7(4), pp.690-703.

Arora, A., Arora, A.S. and Sivakumar, K., 2016. Relationships among supply chain strategies, organizational performance, and technological and market turbulence. The International Journal of Logistics Management, 27(1), pp.206-232.

Carayannis, E.G., Sindakis, S. and Walter, C., 2015. Business model innovation as a lever of organizational sustainability. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 40(1), pp.85-104.

Cortimiglia, M.N., Ghezzi, A. and Frank, A.G., 2016. Business model innovation and strategy making nexus: evidence from a cross?industry mixed?methods study. R&D Management, 46(3), pp.414-432.

Kurucz, E.C., Colbert, B.A., Luedeke-Freund, F., Upward, A. and Willard, B., 2017. Relational leadership for strategic sustainability: practices and capabilities to advance the design and assessment of sustainable business models. Journal of cleaner production, 140, pp.189-204.

Palacios-Marqués, D., Soto-Acosta, P. and Merigó, J.M., 2015. Analyzing the effects of technological, organizational and competition factors on Web knowledge exchange in SMEs. Telematics and Informatics, 32(1), pp.23-32.

Pedersen, E.R.G., Gwozdz, W. and Hvass, K.K., 2018. Exploring the relationship between business model innovation, corporate sustainability, and organizational values within the fashion industry. Journal of Business Ethics, 149(2), pp.267-284.

Saebi, T. and Foss, N.J., 2015. Business models for open innovation: Matching heterogeneous open innovation strategies with business model dimensions. European Management Journal, 33(3), pp.201-213.

Soomro, Z.A., Shah, M.H. and Ahmed, J., 2016. Information security management needs a more holistic approach: A literature review  International Journal of Information Management, 36(2), pp.215-225.

Soomro, Z.A., Shah, M.H. and Ahmed, J., 2016. Information security management needs a more holistic approach: A literature review International Journal of Information Management, 36(2), pp.215-225.

Soto-Acosta, P., Popa, S. and Palacios-Marqués, D., 2016. E-business, organizational innovation and firm performance in manufacturing SMEs: an empirical study in Spain. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 22(6), pp.885-904.

Spieth, P., Schneckenberg, D. and Ricart, J.E., 2014. Business model innovation–state of the art and future challenges for the field. R&d Management, 44(3), pp.237-247.

Talet, A.N., Mat-Zin, R. and Houari, M., 2014. Risk management and information technology projects. International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 4(1), pp.1-10.

Tamayo-Torres, I., Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, L.J., Llorens-Montes, F.J. and Martínez-López, F.J., 2016. Organizational learning and innovation as sources of strategic fit. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 116(8), pp.1445-1467.

Wiengarten, F., Bhakoo, V. and Gimenez, C., 2015. The impact of host country regulatory quality on the value creation process in e-business supply chains. International Journal of Production Research, 53(16), pp.4963-4978.

Yeh, C.H., Lee, G.G. and Pai, J.C., 2015. Using a technology-organization-environment framework to investigate the factors influencing e-business information technology capabilities. Information Development, 31(5), pp.435-450.