Abdulalah Al-Jobore
Unit 33 – The impact of Communication Technology on Business
P5
P5 Explain the competitive pressures on selected, contrasting business organisations to
develop their use of e-business
In this report, I have been asked to produce a report with examples explaining and showing the
competitive pressures on selected, contrasting business organisation to develop their use of e-
business. The two contrasting businesses that I will be using in this report are: eBay and Olive Branch
Liverpool.
EBay is an American multinational e-commerce which you can sell and buy items through their
websites to millions of customers around the world. EBay that facilitates a consumer-to-consumer
(C2C) and business-to consumer (B2C) sales through its web, which means the transactions of
products or service between consumers as well as well as selling and providing products/service to
private consumers. While on the other hand, Olive Branch Liverpool (OBL) is also a profitable
business that provide people with quick Bites, Mediterranean, European, Street Food, and Middle
Eastern food (Halal food) on the high street, but it does not have a web presence, which mean it is
not offering its product and services on internet. Therefore, EBay using the internet to be able to
carry out its different activities while Olive Branch Liverpool does not use the internet due to the fact
that it is a small restaurant in Liverpool city centre. Due to the increase in online trading throughout
the years, the competitive pressures has also increased by these two organisation and their
competitor.
Nowadays the world economy and global competition has increased dramatically and become more
and more rigorous when a business operate in the ecommerce industry. Many companies does not
take the global competition very seriously especially on the internet, as they do not acknowledge the
effective ways to respond to the global competition, and as a result they fail to gain more market
share. The increase in the global economy Implies toady industry faces developing and more growing
completion form all over the world, and these industries are the leading and growing economies
such China and India. The market completion is always there where business competing on price,
products’/services’ quality that offered to customers, or whether it is availability of the goods or the
unique features of the products. In fact,the internet and the sue of e-commerce has increase the
completion between the businesses as it become one of the main prat of our live aspects.
According to Recode website, people are still increasing the amount of time they spend online, for
example in U.S, adults spent 5.9 hours per day on digital media in 2017, up from 5.6 hours the year
before. Some 3.3 of those hours were spent on mobile, which is responsible for overall growth in
digital media consumption. Another statistic shows that E-commerce sales growth is continuing to
accelerate. It grew 16 percent in the U.S. in 2017, up from 14 percent in 2016. Amazon is taking a
bigger share of those sales at 28 percent last year. Conversely, physical retail sales are continuing to
decline comparing to e-commerce business such Amazon and eBay.
https://www.recode.net/2018/5/30/17385116/mary-meeker-slides-internet-trends-code-
conference-2018
Within the global completions , there are some factors that are forcing businesses to develop or
update their use of e-business and these are:
Marketing benefits
Cost benefits
Benefits to customers
Operational implications of trends on organisations
Strategic implications of trends on organisations
Organisational adaptations to trends
Implications of trends on customers
Marketing benefits:
1
, Abdulalah Al-Jobore
Unit 33 – The impact of Communication Technology on Business
P5
The internet development is growing rapidly in the last couple years as it is a global phenomenon
which have become much popular in the developing countries such Europe and Asia countries.
According to the latest statistic, half if not the third of the global populations have used and still
using the internet and 2019 will be no different as the internet and web development is changing
every second. With this dramatically use of the internet, millions of pounds and dollars and other
currencies have been transferred for different purposes over the internet such online shopping and
online banking services.
The availability and access to the internet is become a major trend, as more people want to use the
internet. This because the internet is already an integral part of our everyday lives which encourage
businesses to get online. Although, there are many parts of the world where the internet is limit and
sometimes people cannot access the internet, however some organisations such as the Internet
Society which helps to increase the availability of the internet for the benefit of people.
24-Hours global presence and flexible location
The internet has become a very useful tool that helps the businesses to offer their products and
services 24 hours a day on their online presence (website), which mean anybody can access their
website from anywhere and at any time, as there is the possibility of flexible location. It can help
them to provide their customers with catalogues, description and images of its products and service
allowing the customers to understand their businesses. In addition, promotions of the business can
be displayed over the business’s website 24 hours a day as well using search engine marketing, and
banners for advertisements. It can offer dynamic prices where thy could be changed depending on
the customers’ feedbacks and reviews as well as market conditions.
For eBay, we know that it is a large e-business which do not have a real business on the high street
although they have their offices to run their web, and therefore it runs and operates it business’s
activities offer the internet. On the other hand, Olive Branch Liverpool will have a great benefit from
using the internet. As once they run their own web presence, they will be available 24 hours a day on
the internet, which mean they can promote for their business and offer its products and services 24
hours a day. In fact, it can allow their customers to contact them and send them feedback via the
internet and emails. It can also help them to run their own food delivery service on their website
where the customer can easily place their order online and then the business can deliver their foods
and this can help them to generate sales.
Personalisation and feedback
EBay are on the largest participating online business where anyone from anywhere in the world can
easily registers with eBay and buy products and use their service. Therefore, using a web presence
could be very beneficial in this case for eBay, as once the customer makes a purchase, then eBay can
display personalised recommendations on the next time the customer visit the website and will to
buy something. This is happened because e-businesses such as eBay have a web analytic software,
which help them to identify what the customer have ordered and promoted similar products that
the customer may be interested into. In addition, they could have very important feedback from
their customer which could help to develop their use of the internet as well as their business in
general.
Reformulating the marketing mix
Once the business’s marketing professional are aware of the business’s market segments , and the
groups they are targeting ,then they will need to make a set of decisions about the internet tactics
and tricks that the business will need to use to meet the requirements of the targeting audience.
Therefore, they use the 7PS of the marketing mix to use these tactics. Therefore, the traditional
marketing mix have changed and designed specifically for the online community and know it has
been known as the ‘Marketing remix’’. Traditional business will offer something very distinctive and
2
