Doing business on the web 2.0

Doing business on the web 

High quality internet access

Tasks that need high quality and fast internet access are:

• Listening to internet radio 
• Downloading MP3
• Downloading videos buying a basket of 100 goods from an online grocer
• Downloading videos
• Looking up information 

Investigating local government online: Bedford Borough council 

http://www.bedford.gov.uk


The purpose of this website is to "improve local quality of life. Working together with our partners as part of the Bedford Borough Partnership, we are determined to make the Borough a better place to live, work and visit."  This website is designed to keep people that are living in Bedfordshire with the latest news with present and future plans that the government are going to introduce. Also it gives advice on benefits that you are entitled to and provides you with advice if you want to start up a business. Furthermore there is a section on education stating the term updates and  you can find out about Children's centres, schools and special education needs. 

A benefit for the government for having this website up is that they can hear the consumers opinions and views so that they can shape the government upon these factors. Also they can embrace diversity and strive to meet the particular needs and aspirations of all. Benefits for the consumers is that they can find where they are parking zones and find out about public transport like train or bus times. Also they can find out the history of Bedfordshire, major events and culture. 

The Target market for the website is the people of Bedfordshire because it affects them in one way or another. For example the planned roadworks for 2013 will affect the people driving to work, school or their loved ones as they will  be using them. Bedfordshire borough council has selected their target market to be over the age of eighteen as you can pay bills regarding your council tax and mortgages.   

Live chat 

Adding live chat to website is very useful and it helps in increasing online sales and maximizing return on investment. Just by adding live chat to your website will not work the main thing is to provide 24/7 support to your website visitors. Live Business care providing such services at very nominal prices.Live chat is helpful especially when it comes to customer services in a website. A visitor usually wants a fast reply and a site that offers reliable live chat will surely get an increased online sales and more visitors. Nobody wants to get their time wasted so if a person wants to get a live chat in his site, better make sure that it is functional and not SPAM.  A  survey by Andersen Consulting, nearly 62 percent of Internet consumers said they would buy more products online if live customer support were available.


 However A live chat support option is likely to encourage visitors to your website to ask questions that could easily be answered elsewhere. Some customers will be likely to ask for information that's freely available in the "FAQ" section of your website. This will tie up staff resources and add to your server costs through increased bandwidth use. moreover you would have to employ an additional member of staff to respond to live chat questions if you run a small business, so you'll have to make the job part of an existing worker's responsibilities. Dealing with support inquiries could take a member of staff away from other duties. If the staff member who deals with support questions is ever away from a computer when a query comes in, your company could end up looking unprofessional if a customer is left waiting.The fact that the use of live support is still fairly nascent means there are relatively few reliable statistics about its success in different business sectors.



http://www.iped-uk.com/Live-Chat.html

Tesco horse meat: Positive press

Horse meat scandal-Bad press for Business?

Supermarket chains like Tesco, Iceland, Lidl, and Aldi were forced to remove their beef burgers because they contained horse meat. However most Britain's do not care that it's a foreign meat but it had been a horse.The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) ordered tests to check whether a drug given to horses which can be dangerous to humans - known as bute (phenylbutazone) - had entered the food chain.

 The equine industry in Britain is worth 7 billion pounds.  However in most european countries  horse meat is regarded the same as cow meat but in Britain horses are regarded as a man's friend. Nevertheless 8,000 horses are slaughtered in a year and are shipped to other countries for consumption. 

Tesco apologized by publishing an apology in the national papers.

Tesco promised refunds to customers who had bought the contaminated products, which it identified as Tesco Everyday Value 8 x Frozen Beef Burgers (397g), Tesco 4 x Frozen Beef Quarter Pounders (454g),and a branded product, Flamehouse Frozen Chargrilled Quarter Pounders.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/horse-meat-found-in-tesco-burgers-1536247

The DNA tests found horse in the following products: Tesco Everyday Value Beef Burgers 29.1% of horse meat. The news comes at a bad time for Tesco which is attempting to convince customers about the quality of its products and services after losing market share to rivals. It has admitted the management took its eye off the UK stores during its push for overseas expansion. Nearly £300 million has been wiped off the value of Tesco after a number of its burgers were found to contain horse meat.  

UNIT 1.5: E-BOOKS

E-books

An e-book is basically an electronic version of a book. It is simply nothing more than a electronic file containing the text of an existing book. E-books come in a variety of formats each with its own purpose, features and particular benefits. Some books are made to be like paperbacks, but available on a computer or possible a PDA. The purpose of this is to be able to carry a library of books on a  E-reader. However other e-books intentions are to show a film clip to accompany to a textual description, or play music file to accompany a piece of music. 

Text e-books

Text document based e-books are the most simplest forms of e-book. All that is needed is to write the text in a text editor or scan it into text from paper using a text converter  the file format is simply a text format, so basically it is simply in a linear form in the one document. Although this may be extremely simple it has the advantage of being very easily searchable and portable to any platform.

Word e-books

word document books are created using simple word-processing software and most of the time it is stored in a single word processing document file which manages the content and layout  in a format within the file. Also it is possible to put hyperlinks within the document, which makes it possible to have multimedia content in the e-book. Although multimedia content is usually large, especially when images are put in. Because of this it is not generally not used as a finished format, nevertheless this format can be used in environments where everyone shares shares the same Microsoft office where a number of authors might be required to collaborative simply on a project.  

Adobe PDF e-books 

Adobes portable document format (PDF) are stored in a single PDF file. This file has been extremely successful because virtually all the computers and software manuals are now published and distributed in this format. The majority of the websites that allows downloads of articles, newsletters,and reports will use PDF for such documents. It is also a growing medium for fully fledged e-books.
PDF has a number of features that make it essential for the presentation of textual material.  A PDF file is designed to store the text and layout in a device independent manner so that the original full colour.

Website e-books

One of the most important and flexible format of e-book is that created as a website in HTML or XHTML format. Websites allows videos, images, sounds, movies and animations and can shifted around quite simply to wherever and whenever you want to be, this format allows the richest and most flexible multimedia experience. As the website is a collection of files it is more complicated to put into a single fire. The disadvantage of this is that it adds another stage to creating the e-book, and resulting file might be quite large. Also as it is an Exe. file some firewalls do not trust the content when an attempt made to deliver the file   as .exe files are commonly used to hide viruses and Trojan horse programmes .

Value of e-books 

E-books Offer the readers unlimited books on a e-reader wherever they are. Unlike paperback books e-books can be can be searched by keyword, and organised by chapter page, topic or any method the author decides would be useful. Also the size and font can be changed for the viewers preference. and even the text can be read aloud. E-books can be faster to produce and amend the than conventional books, and thus reference books can be kept to update more easily. As the costs of storage and distributions are so low,e-books can be substantially than paperbacks and often, especially where there are no copyright issues, they are free.

Doing business on the web- Growing the customer base

Doing business on the web  

The growth of internet sales has also led to the growth of new companies who are collecting information from  consumers to spot trend in the retail market.We have seen that most of the increases in retail sales is through internet sales.
In the 12 weeks to 22 January 2012, Tesco's share dropped to 29.9%,
Morrison s' share slipped from 12.4% to 12.3%
Meanwhile, low-cost chains also saw their share of the market grow, with Aldi up from 3.1% to 3.5% and Lidl up from 2.4% to 2.5%.

Internet sales have tripled in the last 6 years whereas the high street shops are being hit by large tax increases and slower sales. As more people are shopping using their laptop,tablets and mobile phones online sales have hit a boom. Traditional high street stores have closed in record numbers over the last year. In 2012, 52 chains comprising almost 4,000 individual shops collapsed, the highest number since 2008. More closures are predicted in 2013. According to the Royal Mail’s poll, 64 per cent of small and medium-sized online retailers expect sales to continue to improve in 2013, despite a competitive consumer environment.

Benefits of online grocery 

one of the biggest benefits of online shopping is that one does not have to go to the supermarket to buy their food. Instead, they can order food online and have it delivered to their door. This is especially useful for people who work long hours and is Independence for: the elderly, the housebound, those laid up with the flu, times of transportation troubles and who are therefore too busy to go shopping. Also it is time efficient and you will be saving petrol, making it environmentally friendly. Another benefit of buying food from an online store is that families, couples and individuals can save money on their weekly food bill. This is due to the fact that online stores often give their customers discounts for shopping online. Also, since people are not wandering down aisles stocked with appetizing food products, they will not buy anything on impulse, therefore saving money. Finally it is much easier to find specific foods on the internet. Instead of running up and down aisles looking for specific items, customers can now type whatever they are looking for in the search option on the website.

Drawbacks of online grocery shopping

Online grocery stores tend to charge very high rates for shipping small items. When a person only purchases one or two products, it is not worthwhile to pay up to 10 pounds for shipping.
These shipping costs are discounted for people who buy a lot of groceries at once.
Large families, as well as people who like to stock up on food will benefit from this.
Online stores encourage people to be at home during delivery, as they will simply leave the food on the doorstep if nobody is at home.This leaves the food at risk of being stolen, eaten by animals or even getting melted in the sun. Another drawback of purchasing food online is that if an item on a grocery list is sold out, the store will make a substitution for the product.Those who want very specific products should go in to the store and purchase them.



Tesco's sell a variety of products including groceries to electronics and is the biggest supermarket in the UK with 6234 stores worldwide and 72 billion group sales. Their website is broken down into sub categories  ( Food, phones), the colour scheme is blue and white in the traditional Tesco colours.  

The website is targeted at pensioners and 40-50 year old. Pensioners may not physically be able to go shopping so therefore they can have easy access to a computer and do online shopping. Usually 40-50 years are in full time employment and have families,so it would be convenient to shop online. 

Strengths 

• The website is very is to access via search engines like bing and google, all you have to do is type in Tesco's and it will be on the top of the page. 
• Also it is simply to use with it being sub categorized Food, entertainment. This allows a user to go directly to a specific product which overall saves time and effort.

Weaknesses 

• There are no options to change languages for people that who are not able to read fluently in English, so they won't be able to access Tesco's online shopping. 
• When you click on a a category it sends you are redirected to a different place, this may confuse customers and make them think that they are not on the Tesco website.