Exploring The E-Commerce To Social Commerce Transition: A Case Study Of Vinomofo
Description of the operations of VINOMOFO
Discuss about the E Commerce to Social Commerce.
In the recent years the advancements in the ICT technologies inspired different business organizations in Australia to adopt the internet as a platform for their business (Chiu et al. 2014). The technology is mainly used to conduct the business transactions, maintaining the business relationships and share business information inside as well as outside the organization. VINOMOFO is one of the business organizations that are using the internet to do business.
This report comprises discussion about the descriptions of VINOMOFO’s operations, the user friendly design of its website, applications used on the site, marketing strategies of the organization. In addition to this, the marketing strategies, security strategies and IT architecture used for doing business is also comprised in this report.
The Site was first launched in Melbourne in the year 2012 by the two entrepreneurs Andre Eikmeier and Justin Dry. Here a brief description about some business processes is provided below.
Curated approach: Even though there are several websites that are selling cheap wines but on the other hand the VINOMOFO adopted “Curated” approach for selling wines online. As per the given information on its site, only 5% of the selected wines, therefore they don’t stock the wines that are not liked by the users of the site.
Secret deals: The Company regularly stocks a secret deal for its customers, which is purchased buy exclusively on the proposal of wine specialists, and the VINOMOFO team (Fraj, Martínez and Matute 2013).
Limited offering at the same time: instead of providing market to market varying offerings, Vinmofo tried to provide limited offerings into several markets at the same time.
Allowing credits to the first users: It is also an interesting part of this e business site that, if an existing users invites someone to the “VINOMOFO” site, then the both of them will get a credit of $25.
Even though “Vinmofo” is a startup launched in 2012, but the site through which it operates the business is very interesting for the users. Some of the features that made it easy to use for the customers are discussed below.
Categories: The Site provides different types of wines, therefore it has provided different categories of wines (Red, white, sparkling) through which the customers can select from. Also this part of the site displays the different offers on the wines.
Attractive online magazine on the site: The site of VINOMOFO also provides an online magazine as a part of its web sites (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). That makes the users curious to find out the new recommendation on the different wines and “how to” guide for storing and serving the wines available on the site.
Ease of use of the E-commerce site Vinmofo
Availability of Cart: The availability of the cart on the website and the allowing customers to edit the contents as per their choice is also helpful to attract customers.
Processing of returns : The site also provides easy and fast return process. For an item that is ordered by a customer and they did not like it after it is delivered to them, the customers can follow few easy steps to provide information and send the wine back.
Detailed product description: As the site is selling different wines, therefore it is important for the customers to know the brand, quality and detailed information about the wine before buying it. Vinmofo provides detailed descriptions of the wine and the producer of the wine so that the users can buy their preferred wine from best producers. In addition to this, offers on the different wines and discounted rates are also displayed so that the customers can get a detailed idea about the wine and its producer.
VINOMOFO selected AWS application to run its e commerce site. It uses the IaaS( infrastructure as a service) from amazon web services. The company uses the services from amazon web services for networking, storage and other associated technical needs. VINOMOFO then built up a basic website in two months, including one deal for each page every day, and deployed it on an AWS cloud (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). According to the development manager Cameron Price-Austin, this deployment and servicing of the VINOMOFO’s site helps the company to concentrate on core business operations rather than on the technical issues which can be handled by external experts. At the same time it will help to save expenditure that is required to setup servers and hiring technical staffs in house.
Outsourcing helped VINOMOFO to deliver more infrastructure availability to its customer base. Amazon also helped VINOMOFO to adjust the required infrastructure according to the demand (Fraj, Martínez and Matute 2013).
The organization’s participation based group empowers it to offer premium wine at a focused cost. VINOMOFO brags more than 400,000 individuals and more than 6.5 million containers of wine sold. Contextually, it is using the digital marketing as an important tool for its upcoming business expansion. In addition to this, VINOMOFO also spends almost one fourth of its total marketing expenses in social advertising. VINOMOFO uses the Kenshoo platform for all its promotions and advertisements.
Figure 1: Home page of “VINOMOFO”
Applications used on the website of VINOMOFO
(Source: Vinomofo.com 2016)
On the other hand, Vinimofo also depends on the marketing by e-mails. It writes personalized e-mails to the existing and potential customers to check out their range of wines once they have the membership of VINOMOFO. Also it asks its existing customers to invite their friends and dear ones to join VINOMOFO by different social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter) (Fraj, Martínez and Matute 2013). The company is also planning to use the Google analytics tool to analyze its online presence and reach to the customers so that they can take new marketing strategies to reach new customers.
One of the reasons that helped VINOMOFO to grow with the existing competition, is its efficient supply chain. Some of the basic points that are addressed by VINOMOFO, are discussed below.
Committed to the delivery dates: Most of the customers of Vimonif orders wines for some occasion, therefore it is important for the company to deliver the ordered product on time. It helps the company to make itself as a first choice for the customers (Chiu et al. 2014).
Revision of the contracts: As the logistics market is dynamic due to different issues (taxes, fuels etc.). Therefore, it is important for VINOMOFO to revise its contracts with its logistics partners to minimize the cost of transportation of the wines from its producers (Huang and Benyoucef 2013).
Attractive offers for loyal customers: To minimize the cost and increase the revenue from the business, VINOMOFO provides free shipping to the customers who orders more than or equal number of cases of wines (Strauss 2016). In addition to this they also provide free returns to the loyal customers too.
The business operations are mainly dependent on the webservers, therefore if any security threat or attacks on this servers then it may happen that, the service or the infrastructure will be unavailable to its customers or the financial data shared by customers can be stolen. Therefore, it is important to use security strategies to retain the customers by providing secured data sharing environment. In order to do this, the following measures are taken by VINOMOFO.
Implementing Firewall : Firewalls are implemented to protect the networks and provide security to the servers from the traffic that is not explicitly permitted.
Use of public key encryption: In order to protect the financial data (credit card details, passwords) shared by the customers the company uses the public key encryption technique so that attackers and intruders could not anticipate the data (Fraj, Martínez and Matute 2013).
Marketing Strategies used by VINOMOFO
The IT architecture adopted at VINOMOFO is helpful from checking the orders by the customers to manage the logistic partner to deliver the wine case. First when a wine is ordered then the system checks for the in stock status of that particular product. After this it generates the warehouse selection tickets and packing slips for the product (Chiu et al. 2014). Once the packing is done, the logistics partner is notified and directed to deliver the system. After this when the wine is delivered to the customers doorstep, the logistics notifies the VINOMOFO using real time reporting mechanism
Conclusion
The report provided an overview about the success of an e business which was launched in the year 2012 and is now one of the successful e-business companies in Australia. The way it uses the ICT technology and internet platform to do their business, provide customer support, manage the supply chain and secure the whole channel of business, it encouraged its customers to buy their preferred wine from VINOMOFO. At the end it can be concluded that, the advancements in the technology and its efficient use by VINOMOFO, helped the company to compete with the giant companies like Coles and Woolies; at the same time a most successful e business start-ups in Australia.
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