Page 174 - Electronic Commerce

Selling on the Web

and clearance sale pages have become a standard element of clothing retailers’ Web sites
and some, such as Overstock.com, are devoted entirely to the sale of overstocked items
purchased from other retailers.

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CREATING AN EFFECTIVE B USI NESS
PRESENCE O NLINE
Businesses have always created a presence in the physical world by building stores,
factories, warehouses, and office buildings. An organization’s presence is the public image
it conveys to its stakeholders. The stakeholders of a firm include its customers, suppliers,
employees, stockholders, neighbors, and the general public. Most companies tend not to
worry much about the image they project until they grow to a significant size—until then,
they are too focused on just surviving to spare the effort. On the Web, presence can be
much more important. Many customers and other stakeholders of a Web business know
the company only through its Web presence. Creating an effective Web presence can be
critical even for the smallest and newest firms operating on the Web.

Identifying Web Presence Goals
When a business creates a physical space in which to conduct its activities, its managers
focus on very specific objectives. Few of these objectives are image driven. The new
company must find a location that will be convenient for its customers, with sufficient
floor space and features to allow the selling activity to occur. A new business must
balance its needs for inventory storage space and employee work space with the costs of
obtaining that space. The presence of a physical business location results from satisfying
these many other objectives and is rarely a main goal of designing the space.
A firm’s physical location must satisfy so many other business needs that it often runs
out of the resources it would need to convey a good presence. On the Web, businesses
and other organizations have the luxury of building their Web sites with the main goal of
creating a distinctive presence. A good Web site design can provide many image-creation
and image-enhancing features very effectively—it can serve as a sales brochure, a product
showroom, a financial report, an employment ad, and a customer contact point. Each
entity that establishes a Web presence should decide which features the Web site can
provide and which of those features are the most important to include. An effective site is
one that creates an attractive presence that meets the objectives of the business or
organization. A list of these objectives, along with some examples of Web site design
strategies that can help accomplish them, appears in Figure 3-5.

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